The "No True Scotsman" defense seems to be used a lot for REST. Don't get me wrong, I try to stay RESTful as much as possible but hardly anyone writes "truely RESTful APIs".

> but hardly anyone writes "truely RESTful APIs".

That's pretty much what I said! Web frameworks don't help you at all in this regard, which is why REST is unncessarily difficult to implement. Most web frameworks give you just enough for HTTP-based RPC.

REST is meant to be discoverable by humans, but actually coding to a "true" REST system, using only hypermedia, is a damn nightmare.

Fielding's thesis doesn't really specify anything in particular about human discoverability, except that REST systems are typically user agent driven compared to typical distributed systems.

As for the nightmare of REST, the real question is whether this difficult is intrinsic, or merely a product of immature tooling and poor understanding. No web framework I've seen, apart from the Waterken server, actually helps you achieve REST. They're largely all HTTP-based RPC frameworks.