I'm walking away from this article unable to find a really good reason to implement HATEOAS in an API meant to be consumed by a program (as Application Programming Interfaces typically are).

The best I can come up with (and this is me trying to like it) is that I guess the API is somewhat self documenting?

I see benefits to resource orientation and statelessness, but why do people get so upset about these APIs not following HATEOAS? Is it just a form of pedantry, that it's not really a REST API, it's a sparkling JSON-RPC?