It's funny because HATEOAS violations were single-handedly the most common violation made by the client team during my time there. They loved hard coding URLs and willfully ignoring hypermedia.
See, to me, this sounds like a failure to listen to your customer. They were telling you that well known URLs were useful to them, and you were forcing them to make more compromises so that you could make fewer.
Sort of. Verbs are still eschewed so rather than finding a 'book' link, it would be a 'booking' link to which a POST could be made to create a new booking. As a note, "Booking" is a confusing example because while a hotel booking is a noun it at first glance reads as a progressive tense verb.
So instead of a hard coded url it's a hard coded reference to a url? How does it deal with a breaking changing? Say the order of the links changes? It doesn't seem like this works without some out of band information.
