> Most of the time, those “things” are dumb business logic applications that can’t explore the hypermedia to discover new functionality and furthermore are not designed to do anything with it anyway.
Dumb business logic is not the point. One of the benefits of HATEOAS is that it allows REST clients to be loosely coupled with REST services, in a way that APIs can change freely change (i.e., change endpoints around, break away functionalities into other services, etc.) without requiring clients to be updated under the penalty of breaking compatibility.
The main reason why no one does REST and everyone does RPC-over-HTTP is that while REST clients require tracking and updating state to support service discovery, RPC-over-HTTP just requires a single HTTP request to achieve the same purpose, albeit without the resilience and future-proof.
Dumb business logic is not the point. One of the benefits of HATEOAS is that it allows REST clients to be loosely coupled with REST services, in a way that APIs can change freely change (i.e., change endpoints around, break away functionalities into other services, etc.) without requiring clients to be updated under the penalty of breaking compatibility.
The main reason why no one does REST and everyone does RPC-over-HTTP is that while REST clients require tracking and updating state to support service discovery, RPC-over-HTTP just requires a single HTTP request to achieve the same purpose, albeit without the resilience and future-proof.