I remember wasting a huge amount of time on this debate over a decade ago. Frankly, I think the issue is that HATEOAS is not useful enough. It's a really nice i

I remember wasting a huge amount of time on this debate over a decade ago. Frankly, I think the issue is that HATEOAS is not useful enough. It's a really nice idea, but in practice nobody actually wants to write an API client that way. So they don't. So API creators don't optimize for it. I consider all of RPC, GraphQL, and bastardized-REST systems to be less elegant but more pragmatic than "true REST". I can still palpably feel how refreshing it was when I finally went to work somewhere that didn't bother with this whole debate and just focused on building good RPC interfaces. More people should embrace that.