Particularly this subthread which was my moment of enlightenment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507991. A truly restful API isn't for a program to consume, it's for _you_, the user to consume through your user agent. Clicking on links is a hypermedia driven, restful api.

I think I saw a comment somewhere by the htmx dev, that Fielding was just giving a name to how the web already was at the time, hyperlinks rendered by a browser that you can navigate in a stateless way to get things done without the user agent being coupled to the sites themselves. It makes sense when you view it as backward-looking academic analysis rather than practical prescriptive advice.

But once you have that defined you can talk about whether things are more or less restful. That's separate from whether something being "more restful" is even good or desired though.