I would go even further and say that REST is BS Most people understand REST as a format for URLs and a particular semantics for HTTP methods. While it can be perfectly ok to design an api like person?id=123. This is the way that Postgrest does it, which works, and makes certain things like entities with composite primary keys way easier.

Other, like OP, think REST isn't going far enough in that HATEOAS is what "really" makes something restfull. This doesn't really work in practice as if changing the schema of some JSON response can magically change the behaviour of an application. I you want to lift all the logic to the server, I guess you can use htmx, but then you are not building an api anymore but a remote rendering engine.

Care to elaborate briefly on why they do?

HATEOAS adds that to REST.