You can see attempts to formalize this "HATEOAS-less REST" in frameworks like the Richardson Maturity Model [1].

One less-discussed area where REST has taken hold is in indexing/SEO (i.e. the Semantic Web's success stories). JSON-LD and other RDF microformats/representations are pervasive, while crawlers are much closer to the platonic ideal of a generic client consuming the uniform interface than most web API clients.

[1] https://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.ht...