I don't understand the coupling aspect. You're moving from one dependency (URIs) to another (implementation of discoverability). Until HATEOAS/discoverability

I don't understand the coupling aspect. You're moving from one dependency (URIs) to another (implementation of discoverability). Until HATEOAS/discoverability/rest links themselves are a standard, you're just binding to the way that API decided to do it. And that in my mind is a much bigger dependency than a URI string.