I have created Hypermedia APIs using HTTP/JSON for service-to-service interactions, and it is definitely a lot of work for questionable benefit.

The biggest problem with the bad style of RPC-style programming was the assumption that remote calls could be treated like local calls. Modern HTTP-based RPC APIs don't make that assumption and thr problems of distributed computing are handled explicitly.

The semantics of HTTP verbs, semantically meaningful namespace trees for resources in the URL, standard authentication and encoding, etc are all nice benefits of HTTP APIs even without hypermedia.

That said, I haven't given up on hypermedia APIs! I liken them to "fluent" APIs of OOP. It's a powerful design approach, but I just wonder how to capture the benefits of that approach over what most people are doing today.