I've always been a bit undecided on this. I can see some obvious upsides, but on the other hand (apart from the downsides mentioned in the article and elsewhere) you've added 500 bytes to this entity for functionality that's only useful to the developer. Is the ability to click around in a HAL browser instead of a Swagger document worth the verbosity? Is there an argument that we might produce clients that can meaningfully deal with new links being presented without a developer being involved? I'd be surprised if that was realistic.
Yes, 500 bytes extra but it's not only for the developer discovering the API in a browser. If the client developer is exploring the API and then manually implementing an API client something is not right.
Hal clients for this use case do exist. you point them to an entrypoint and they can discover and generate the necessary code/methods for interacting with the API.
