It was buried towards the bottom of the article, but the reason, to me:
Clients can be almost automatic with a HATEOS implementation, because it is a self describing protocol.
Of course, Open API (and perhaps to some extent now AI) also mean that clients don't need to be written they are just generated.
However it is important perhaps to remember the context here: SOAP is and was terrible, but for enterprise that needed a complex and robust RPC system, it was beginning to gain traction. HATEOS is a much more general yet simple and comprehensive system in comparison.
Of course, you don't need any of this. So people built APIs they did need that were not restfull but had an acronym that their bosses thought sounded better than SOAP, and the rest is History.
> Clients can be almost automatic with a HATEOS implementation, because it is a self describing protocol.
That was the theory, but it was never true in practice.
The oft comparisons to the browser really missed the mark. The browser was driven by advanced AI wetware.
Given the advancements in LLMs, it's not even clear that RESTish interfaces would be easier for them to consume (say vs. gRPC, etc.)