[niftich]

REST as seen in HTTP has always been about resources (identified by URLs), representations thereof that take the form of a particular mediatype (selected explicitly or by content negotiation), and hyperlinks (with targets and rels).

When resources are obvious nouns already present in the backend's data model, this maps well to CRUD. The problem comes when trying to describe complex mutations, because to most people, this feels wrong, instilled by years of Dos and Don'ts of half-baked lessons about Object Oriented design.

In all this time between when Roy's thesis was rediscovered to promote an architectural style and when the trendiness of REST has finally run its course, there were far too many posts complaining about deployments missing hyperlinks (when usually, the API was externally documented, URLs templated, and its clients hardcoded, making many usecases of embedded hyperlinks moot), and not enough to reassure flummoxed designers that naming resources after verbal nouns or deverbal nouns is perfectly fine. Oops.