I worked with a Corba based system back in the nineties and what killed ours wasn't network costs, it was circular hidden dependencies making the system fragile.
The support guys had a complicated procedure for restarting it that involved a very carefully orchestrated sequence, which sometimes didn't work so they had to start from scratch.
I was on a team that used CORBA to distribute across five machines: input, output, logic, UI, and whatever the CORBA object discovery thing was. (I don’t know what they were thinking.)
They didn’t try to run it all together until it was time to ship.
Networking overhead definitely killed us. That, and incompetence.
