I believe you could, but the one time I saw it done in practice it confused the heck out of most of the client devs and ended up being rewritten (this was an API talked to by multiple teams who were within the same megacorp but far enough away organisationally to be effectively 'just' users).

I might consider using it for an API whose primary purpose is to support a specific client app that I also control, so users running older versions of the client app still get the desired results, but I don't think the additional elegance is a suitable trade-off for a general-use-by-others API sadly.