You're entirely right. Another problem with REST is that Fielding himself describes it as a "large grain resource approach". It's no surprise we love HTTP and

You're entirely right. Another problem with REST is that Fielding himself describes it as a "large grain resource approach". It's no surprise we love HTTP and URLs when we have to return, say, images, downloads or entire documents in our APIs. Just put the URL in, serve it on your CDN. But for small grain data items, it's terrible.