On the one hand the failure is legit, success foiled by rampant vendorization & byzantine inscrutable tooling pumping out forsaken impossible to introspect generated code.
But also CORBA was maybe as far as I can tell the first programming tech to ever get canceled. That everyone went Vampire Castle on & decided collectively to crap on & lambast. What before CORBA had such a loyal hate club, was so bandwagon to disdain? It was a boogeyman tale, one we collectively whispered ourselves away from, even though most people had little sense.
It'd be interesting to try to dig up some of the old GNOME 2 efforts that did have Corba stuff in various apps & systems. Try to find some authors to say how they felt at the time. Go look at the code & see how it was.
The idea of having objects that can connect acriss boundaries is indeed super interesting. I love webdev & it's great, but we have noticeably not gotten very far in 20 years. GraphQL was one would be normalizing upstart, and ideas like resolvers have some merit, but it's still chiefly a state transfer system (which also has real time. Subscribe mode). It's still not really a well paved way to connect systems.
Even if we don't have distributed objects, just expanding the range of normative things we can do with resources on the web feels like it hasn't greatly expanded. Our efforts are still artisinal, handcraft by each team. We need to start figuring out, even if not distributed objects per se, how to grow the capabilities of online/connected systems pervasively.