> The inspiration was humans surfing freely through interlinked web pages, but API clients just don't naturally do that.

There's nothing unnatural about it, it's just one extra step to use a name that the service must guarantee is stable rather than directly accessing a hard-coded URL which can be unstable. You're used to:

    var client = new HttpClient();
    var result = client.Post("http://somehost.com/api/hardcoded-service-resource", /*pass some data*/);

The resource URL is hard-coded with a specific structure and meaning, which means the service can never change it without breaking clients. A simple REST equivalent would be:

     var client = new HttpClient();
     var entry = client.Get("http://somehost.com/api/entry").ParseHypermedia();
     var result = client.Post(entry.StableNameForEndpointIWantToCall, /*pass some data*/);

There's nothing all that unnatural about this. The key is that the entry point returns a description of the API using hypermedia which maps stable names to unstable URLs. This allows service to change its internal structure as long as the entry point returns a hypermedia result that has a stable structure.

You can think of HATEOAS for APIs like DNS for API URLs. Calling it "unnatural" is like saying that hard-coding IP addresses in your clients is more natural than using DNS names. That's just crazy talk!