The history did its job: it preserved the most useful features of the original idea (expressing RPCs as URLs in GET and POST requests) and has dropped the unnecessarily complicated bits.
What this article is about is a pedantic terminology battle of whether to call the current practice REST or not.
you're describing what a browser does.
> has dropped the unnecessarily complicated bits.
you're viewing this content from a browser.
In other words, HTML is just the standard format that the browser uses. But if you use frameworks or define your own application specific formats, you can send less information over the wire and have it properly decoded and displayed by your client-side javascript.
You're really tying your server to the browser at that point so things like CLI clients and mobile clients become painful to write (not impossible but ain't nobody got time for parsing HTML when browsers do a perfectly good job of it, not to mention CSS.).