FWIW, Roy Fielding's paper[1] on REST (where the word comes from) was very specific that a REST api is a hypermedia/hypertext based api, and that if it isn't hypermedia, it isn't REST. He clarified[2] this later on. This isn't from some internet toughguy, but the guy who literally coined the phrase. Sadly, his implementation was also all XML so gross, but you get the idea. HATEOS is just an implementation of a JSON based hypermedia api.

Me? I'm a fan of grpc for everything. HTTP/2 > HTTP1 and binary compressed protobuffers > deflate compressed (gz) json. http://grpc.io

[1] https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arc...

[2] http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...