I think it's amazing that you're the first person I've ever seen make this very obvious point, which was the first thing that popped into my head when I first started reading about REST and HATEOAS APIs (or as I would call them, navigational APIs*). It's always seemed to me that REST tutorials and evangelism ought to address this basic objection upfront, if they do have good counterarguments, but I've never seen them do so.
(A good HATEOS client would take the form of a graph navigator - this style of programming is one I associate more with "AI" than with typical web programming patterns. Which doesn't make it bad necessarily, but the REST material I've seen doesn't actually get into the navigational client programming side of things, which is the actual interesting part.)
(A good HATEOS client would take the form of a graph navigator - this style of programming is one I associate more with "AI" than with typical web programming patterns. Which doesn't make it bad necessarily, but the REST material I've seen doesn't actually get into the navigational client programming side of things, which is the actual interesting part.)