[snlacks]

There's a dissertation and thousands of articles(one if which this comments section links to) that go into all the minutiae of a "proper" REST implementation. My comment poses the idea that an understanding of the proper or pure implementation isn't as important as the broad concepts that you are saying define the whole idea of REST. On the crux of the argument, we are in agreement - those academic details don't really matter.

[ivan_gammel]

The thing is, nobody can agree on those broad concepts because they are too vague. On every technical interview I’m asking one question „what is REST?“ usually followed by another „how is different from RPC?“ The answers Usually differ so much, that there’s no way to understand what kind of API these people are describing. It’s like in that tale about six blind men, describing an elephant after touching different parts of its body: one said elephant is like a snake, because he touched only the trunk. Another compared it to a tree after touching a leg. And so on.