If the middle-tier and the app are both written in JavaScript, and you're developing them both simultaneously in the browser, does it make sense for them to be

If the middle-tier and the app are both written in JavaScript, and you're developing them both simultaneously in the browser, does it make sense for them to be communicating via REST any more? Wouldn't it make more sense for the app to send SQL prepared statements to the database (via a tiny standardised wrapper on the server to enforce per-user permissions based on the authenticated session)? It probably depends on whether other apps are requesting data from the same database, in which case it might make sense to convert from the relational model to JSON objects in a tier which exposes the objects over REST.