It is.

MCP serves a single purpose: If you ask some company for API support for some stuff you can do via web UI but not API, they might say no for many reasons. But when you ask for MCP, suddenly you trigger AI FOMO and it will be available right away.

Yes, MCP is an API.

Previously, it was an API with a weird stateful standard; now it is essentially a bog-standard stateless JSON-RPC API with conventions for tool discovery, long-running tasks and multi-round-trip requests

If you wrote your own JSON-RPC API for an LLM, you would probably eventually end up with something that looks very much like the standard they're describing.

Its more targeted? Sure I can allow an LLM to access CLI, but then it will try to pipe to other command, write scripts etc. MCP is simply request/response. Its not really that technically different, but the way you and LLMs interact with it allows for easier control. IMHO.