While WCF supports WS-* and is in large part organized around it, some of the complexity isn't "because WS-", its "because WCF is a higher-level abstraction that supports, among other things, WS-* ".
I mean, you can apply all that overengineered configuration to build REST services with WCF, too. You probably don't want to (unless you are already heavily invested in WCF), but you can.
And it fails spectacularly. I mean, _it works_, but it's a disaster to work with and write software against.
The entire abstraction is leaking profusely, all precisely "because WS-*". Who in their right mind will attempt to establish a family of standards for "transport-agnostic" communication, routing, serialization and whatnot when realistically 99% of the time HTTPS is all you ever need?
Can you give an example of how it's a disaster? I'm genuinely curious because I've had to use it for at least 5 years (I still support 1 WCF solution) and this was never my experience.