Comment by gsibble

I built a company that actually did implement HATEOS in our API. It was a nightmare. So much processing time was spent on every request setting up all the URLs and actions that could be taken. And no one used it for anything anyways. Our client libraries used it but we had full control over them anyways and if anything, it made the libraries more complex.

While I agree it's an interesting idea in theory, it's unnecessary in the real world and has a lot of downsides.