Totally agree, the web itself is absolutely HATEOAS, but there was a type of person in the 2000s era who insisted that APIs were not truly RESTful if they weren't also hypermedia APIs, but the only real benefit of those APIs was to enable overly generic API clients that were usually strictly worse than even clumsily tailored custom clients.
The missing piece was having machines that could handle enough ambiguity to "understand" the structure of the API without it needing to be generic to the point of uselessness.
The missing piece was having machines that could handle enough ambiguity to "understand" the structure of the API without it needing to be generic to the point of uselessness.