HATEOAS is much less important for programmatic APIs. You either hard-code knowledge of the URL scheme in the API client, or you hard-code knowledge of the payload schema in the API client. There isn't a huge amount of difference here IMO, especially if you have some kind of versioning mechanism in your URL routing.

Hard-coding URL scheme permits more pipelining and concurrency in the client. Embedding URLs in payloads forces sequencing. This alone can make the templated URL scheme a win for interactivity.