In my experience, when people talk about a REST API design, they often discuss two aspects:

• The URIs design : “is it correct to use query parameters here ?”
• The HTTP method: “should we use PUT or PATCH?”

These discussions can be interesting, really. There is always situations of debate about a good and a bad design. But… Does it really matter?

Have a look at the web:

• Ugly URLs exists, and no one cares; because we use Google to get links to browse
• Browsers only know GET and POST, and it works! (as would say an Apache Server)

We can then easily conclude that URIs and HTTP methods are not as important as we can imagine, right?

What is important ?

I think there is another element that leads to that: minimizing the importance of the Hypermedia Constraint in the API Design. By focusing only on Json data serializations, we forget to think about the real service orientation of the REST Uniform Interface constraint.