I consider myself a very pragmatic developer in general. For example, I don't write unit tests for throw-away code.

But, ignoring the hypermedia constraint on a RESTful API is not being pragmatic, it's being wrong. You're making an API cool. You're probably even embracing microservices. But it's not REST.

Most of the time, by "REST" people understand just randomly slapped together protocol that aspires to be RPC, which is too underdeveloped and loosely defined to be proper RPC.

Pragmatism is not a poison. Valuing intelligence over wisdom is.

No, poverty + busyness + laziness is the poison.