Exactly. ReST as a concept is not even tied to HTTP. HTTP's design was just heavily influenced my ReST so it happens to be good at it. Somehow people are obsessed over URL formatting and HTTP specificities... while they are important, it's not the literal embodiment of what representation state transfer is, just an implementation of it.
What most people talk about when they say REST are good HTTP practices. Meaningful URLs, proper methods, etc... are all about using HTTP properly. We can call some of these views other acronyms like ROA but it's really just appreciation for proper and modern HTTP stacks.
Actually, that's not true. ReST was developed in parallel with HTTP 1.1. It used the basics from HTTP 1.0 to express some of the new ideas. You can read about the original idea in Fielding's disertation here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch...
If it were an extraction of anything, it wouldn't have been HTTP but existing ideas in scaling web architectures in general at the time.
What most people talk about when they say REST are good HTTP practices. Meaningful URLs, proper methods, etc... are all about using HTTP properly. We can call some of these views other acronyms like ROA but it's really just appreciation for proper and modern HTTP stacks.