That's false. The browseable web itself uses hypermedia. And there are formats that use it successfully, like OData, GData and ActivityPub. HATEOAS is not magi

That's false. The browseable web itself uses hypermedia. And there are formats that use it successfully, like OData, GData and ActivityPub. HATEOAS is not magic. It's not about having arbitrary JSON APIs that can be magically understood by clients. It's just about formats that support linking between resources in a standardized manner (like HTML), among other things, that's it.