There are two fundamental reasons HATEOS just doesn't work in practice. The first is that most services can't easily or reliably know their own absolute URLs ,

There are two fundamental reasons HATEOS just doesn't work in practice. The first is that most services can't easily or reliably know their own absolute URLs , and HATEOS (and the behavior of many HTTP libraries) is inconsistent around relative URLs, so hacky and unmaintainable response rewriting gets applied at various levels. The second is that if you are diligently following a convention for how paths are constructed it's utterly redundant information--you can simply synthesize any path you need more easily than you can grok it out of HATEOS. The reasonable bits of REST that are left are not just HTTP verbs and JSON, but significantly the use of entity type names and ids in the path portion of the URL rather than in query parameters.