Why should I (or you, for that matter) go and tell them their restful has nothing to do with rest? Why does it matter? They're making perfectly fine HTTP APIs, and they use the industry standard term to describe what kind of HTTP API it is.
It's convenient to have a word for "HTTP API where entities are represented by JSON objects with unique paths, errors are communicated via HTTP status codes and CRUD actions use the appropriate HTTP methods". The term we have for that kind of API is "rest". And that's fine.
1. Never said I'm going to tell them. It's on someone else. I'm just going to lower my expectation from such developers accordingly.
2. So just "HTTP API". And that would suffice. Adding "restful" is trying to be extra-smart or fit in if everyone's around an extra-smart.
> 1. Never said I'm going to tell them. It's on someone else. I'm just going to lower my expectation from such developers accordingly.
This doesn't seem like a useful line of conversation, so I will ignore it.
> 2. So just "HTTP API".
No! There are many kinds of HTTP APIs. I've both made and used "HTTP APIs" where HTTP is used as a transport and API semantics are wholly defined by the message types. I've seen APIs where every request is an HTTP POST with a protobuf-encoded request message and every response is a 200 OK with a protobuf-encoded response message (which might then indicate an error). I've seen GraphQL APIs. I've seen RPC-style APIs where every "RPC call" is a POST requset to an endpoint whose name looks like a function name. I've seen APIs where request and response data is encoded using multipart/form-data.
Hell, even gRPC APIs are "HTTP APIs": gRPC uses HTTP/2 as a transport.
Telling me that something is an "HTTP API" tells me pretty much nothing about how it works or how I'm expected to use it, other than that HTTP is in some way involved. On the other hand, if you tell me that something is a "REST API", I already have a very good idea about how to use it, and the documentation can assume a lot of pre-existing context because it can assume that I've used similar APIs before.
> On the other hand, if you tell me that something is a "REST API", I already have a very good idea about how to use it (...)
Precisely this. The value of words is that they help communicate concepts. REST API or even RESTful API conveys a precise idea. To help keep pedantry in check, Richardson's maturity model provides value.
Everyone manages to work with this. Not those who feel the need to attack people with blanket accusations of mediocrity, though. They hold onto meaningless details.
You're being needlessly pedantic, and it seems the only purpose to this pedantry is finding a pretext to accuse everyone of being mediocre.