I commented in depth a little farther up in the tree, but the big difference between hypermedia in the web, and hypermedia in an API designed to be consumed by

I commented in depth a little farther up in the tree, but the big difference between hypermedia in the web, and hypermedia in an API designed to be consumed by machines is the intelligence and judgement needed. It's a lot of work to make a very generic client that can navigate a hyper media API given only media types and link types. But it's trivial for a human because we can figure things out from context. Maybe once we can run gpt-3 on a mobile phone lightning fast, we can start building these fuzzy, flexible apis and not worry about breaking our clients. But in the meantime, it's a ton of work for very little gain.