Microformats was based on standard html. That comes with pros and cons. Pros being its very easy to adopt, including in legacy CMS systems that might not support the other fancier stuff. For that matter, it also means web developers already understand it (Especially compared to writing XML RDF documents...)

It also allowed mixing the presentation with the format. that meant people only had to maintain one copy of data, so its less likely to get out of sync, and people are less likely to forget to add the data later on.

Downside is you're using something not really meant to support the use case of annotating data, so it ends up being a bit hacky.

These things also did not come out all at the same time. Future techniques were partially made in response to microformats, just like (I'm assuming a bit here) that microformats were made as a response to SemanticWeb RDF-XML stuff.

I did a comparison here a while back: Simpler, more terse, use class rather than extra properties or giant json blobs. http://www.kevinmarks.com/microformatschema.html

One key thing I've found useful of it is that it attempts to reduce duplication, by marking up existing data with CSS classes that then provide meaning

predating them. everything you listed is inspired by/based on microformats