Comment by sporkland

As someone that criticized a number of their employers API's for not being sufficiently ReSTful especially with regards to HatEoS, I eventually realized the challenge is the clients. App developers and client developers mostly just want to deal with structured objects that they've built fixed function UX around (including the top level) and desire constructing URLs on the client. It takes a special kind of developer to desire building special mini-browsers everywhere that would require hateos and from the server side.

I think LLM's are going to be the biggest shift in terms of actually driving more truly ReSTful APIs, though LLM's are probably equally happy to take ReST-ish responses, they are able to effectively deal with arbitrary self describing payloads.

MCP at it's core seems to design around the fact that you've got an initial request to get the schema and then the payload, which works great for a lot of our not-quite-ReST API's but you could see over time just doing away with the extra ceremony and doing it all in one request and effectively moving back in the direction of true ReST.