Then almost no REST api i've seen out there the is a REST api,which is my point exactly.
If you're writing a spec almost nobody understands and almost nobody truly implements yet everybody think they implement, then you failed at writing that spec. Because I can guarantee you out there a only few people understand HATEOAS.
And that's the heart of the problem. The reason is easy. While the idea of using a few verbs, etags and content negotiation is easy, HATEOAS is hard,period.It's hard the person who implements the api ( because someone has to code all the logic representing these states, the links, ...) ,it's hard for the client: the client has to be smart, urls aren't hard coded but need to be fetched from somewhere , and the body of a response needs to be parsed to know in which state the resource is, the actions, the relationships between resources, or sometimes the links are in the headers... You're not just sending data but also metadatas (just like RPC) that are only relevant in the REST logic, not in the actual application logic ... you're basically writing a web bot every time you're writing a rest client... All that for what? elegance basically.
As your link says, most devs are just using RPC with beautiful urls to begin with and stamp "RESTfull" on that. Don't you think there is a real issue here? I do.