I'm not confusing it. I was heavily motivated by business goals to find a general solution for HATEOAS-ifying API definitions. And yes, a web page, implemented in HTML/CSS/JS is a facsimile for it in a certain sense, but it's not self-contained RESTful API definition.
Again, you're talking about a particular web page, when I'm talking about the entire World Wide Web. The API of the WWW is indeed a RESTful API, driven entirely by hyperlinks. You can consider the WWW as a single service in this sense, where there is a single, and your browser is a client of that service. The API of this service is described in the HTTP RFCs and the WHATWG living standard for HTML, and the ECMAScript standard.
Say I as a user want to read the latest news stories of the day in the NYT. I tell my browser to access the NYT website root address, and then it contacts the server and discovers all necessary information for achieving this task on its own. It may choose to present this information as a graphical web page, or as a stream of sound, all without knowing anything about the NYT web site a priori.
