No, of course you'd be like `PATCH {"light": "off"} /lamp`!
Kidding of course but it's true that REST purity does not make for intuitive APIs in complex real-world problem domains.
Where?
And it does often end up mattering, for clarity where at its use sites where you won't have the type declaration to help you out, and for having "student" available as a name in the same scope, as it's typical to pull an item out of a collection.
/student/all looks particularly icky to me. For getting a student, it seems unlikely that we'd identify one using these words, but in other domains, they may end up conflicting with another resource. Whatever you end up doing about that, it'll surely be gross.
I think plurals are better so nyah! Heh.
Also, it's totally my job to get hung up on these kinds of details. Clarity, avoiding collisions, enabling easy expansion, and especially averting future breaking changes to deal with the aforementioned matter to others.
Meanwhile, APIs, as interfaces, are forever. And the dumbest thing to do is to decide to have two names for one type in an interface, because grammar happens to have single and plural version for words. Why would you do that? APIs have no grammar, they're not sentences, they're made of identifiers that need to uniquely identify something. So stop trying to force grammar in.
In HTML, I might have a FORM that does a POST of the lamp's switch to /lamp/switch.
Because the switch is the resource that you're trying to manipulate when turning a lamp on/off, not the lamp itself.
If you think `GET /student` is confusing, or more importantly, structurally restrictive as an API, you can think about it as `GET /student/filter` where the "filter" may be a specific student id, or a range of ids, or other conditions such as `GET /student/top` or `GET /student/graduated` and then all students will be just the filter "all" or: `GET /student/all`.
As for `POST /student/create`... it doesn't matter. To use one of Fielding's own examples from his blog, how'd you turn a lamp on and off via REST? Would you be like `POST /lamp`? No. It's unclear WTF is happening.