I'm amazed that you feel this way, because my experience is completely the opposite. Banging out the REST API portion of things is usually a mechanical wrapper

I'm amazed that you feel this way, because my experience is completely the opposite. Banging out the REST API portion of things is usually a mechanical wrapper around some business process in the systems I have been creating. CRUD comes into play with entity manipulation, of course, but that's only one facet and in my current case, not even the dominant one. In fact, I don't even know why you'd think you have to map business processes to CRUD at all. It almost seems like you have some religous belief about what REST actually is, much like how the article talks about "de facto" standards that are nothing of the sort. I suppose you have strange requirements or design impositions that make your life difficult, but I caution you against believing that your use case is universal because in my very real experience, none of your opinions are supportable.