Thank you, Dominic. You raise some interesting issues about how REST is used. Though many developers do view REST APIs through CRUD-colored glasses, CRUD is not the purpose of REST.

Contrary to a common misconception, REST does not exist solely to interact with relational or document databases. It is well-designed to transfer the representations of many kinds of objects back and forth between clients and servers. That just happens to make it useful when we need to talk to a DBMS.

If one wants to work with only a small subset of an object's representation, the query parameters of the call can easily filter the passed data, and the PATCH method with diffs can send only changes to the server.

REST takes its name from the proposition that a thing can be created or manipulated through its representation on the client side, and that the representation can be transferred to the server to set its state there. It is simple, clean, and elegant if understood and used properly. You might find the links below worth reading.

https://github.com/flipkart-incubator/zjsonpatch/blob/master/README.md

https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/designing-a-rest-api-3a070398750f