Yes, but there were some people that were pushing HATEOAS for APIs. I think the fact that pretty much no one does it is good enough evidence to see that it's just not a good fit. HATEOAS is good for web sites and human operators, but not for APIs being executed by software.
HATEOAS is describing how the browser and HTML works.
It was the JSON API folks who (inappropriately) appropriated REST terminology that made folks feel like they had to shoehorn that concept into what is really RPC.