> REST (or, rather, how REST is broadly used) encourages you to think in terms of Resources rather than Models or ViewModels. At first, your Resources start out as mirroring Models. But a single Model rarely has enough data for a screen, so you develop ad-hoc conventions for nesting Models in a Resource. However, including all the relevant Models (e.g. all Likes of a Post) is often impossible or impractical, so you start adding ViewModel-ish fields like friendLikes to your Resources.

So, let's assume the alternative universe, where we did not mess up and got REST wrong.

There's no constraint saying a resource (in the hypermedia sense) has to have the same shape as your business data, or anything else really. A resource should have whatever representation is most useful to the client. If your language is "components" because you're making an interactive app – sure, go ahead and represent this as a resource. And we did that for a while, with xmlhttprequest + HTML fragments, and PHP includes on the server side.

What we were missing all along was a way to decouple the browser from a single resource (the whole document), so we could have nested resources, and keep client state intact on refresh?