Can you point me to a source for this argument? I'd be interested in taking a look at the reasoning behind it. Obviously, that's an approach that a lot of people take for pragmatic reasons, but it doesn't seem to allow the kind of hyperlinking that's the core idea of HATEOAS. Of course, the term "object representation" is pretty generic, and may obviously somehow include links to related resources and application states.
"The model application is therefore an engine that moves from one state to the next by examining and choosing from among the alternative state transitions in the current set of representations."