In the Java world both Spring and Guice are meant to do this, and if you have an ISomething you've got the possibility of making an ILocalSomething and a IDistributedSomething and swap one for the other.
This is generally a bad idea imo. You fundamentally will have a hard time if your api is opaquely network-dependent or not. I suppose, you’ll be ok if you assume there is a network call, but that means your client will need to pay that cost every time, even if using the ILocal.
It depends on what the API is. For instance you might use something like JDBC or SQLAlchemy to access either a sqlite database or a postgres database.
But you are right that the remote procedure call is a fraught concept for more reasons than one. On one hand there is the fundamental difference between a local procedure call that takes a few ns and a remote call which might take 1,000,000 longer. There's also the fact that most RPC mechanisms that call themselves RPC mechanisms are terribly complicated, like DCOM or the old Sun RPC. In some sense RPC became mainstream once people started pretending it was REST. People say it is not RPC but often you have a function in your front end Javascript like fetch_data(75) and that becomes GET /data/75 and your back end JAXB looks like
@GET
@Path("/{id}")
public List<Data> fetchData(@PathParam("id") int id) { ... }
