I disagree. I don't think it's too much to ask of software developers to be the bare minimum of competent enough to wire up a basic web service in whatever language they are dealing. REST is not complex.
REST isn't complex, but API design is still hard. Making a strategic choice not to design a service API but to ship the same code in two places is valid, and arguably the right one if that's what the teams skills lend themselves to.
Over the past two decades I’ve seen a well implemented RESTful API exactly once, in a relatively small project. The rest of REST apis are ad-hoc RPC over HTTP, I’d argue because it isn’t complex and complexity moves to the client.
