I've been doing web development for more than a decade and I still can't figure out what REST actually means, it's more of a vibe.

When I think about some of the RESTy things we do like return part of the response as different HTTP codes, they don't really add that much value vs. keeping things on the same layer. So maybe the biggest value add so far is JSON, which thanks to its limited nature prevents complication, and OpenAPI ecosystem which grew kinda organically to provide pretty nice codegen and clients.

More complexity lessons here: look at oneOf support in OpenAPI implementations, and you will find half of them flat out don't have it, and the other half are buggy even in YOTL 2025.