I agree in the sense rest is not as imortant as say: is the api XML or JSON? I’ve integrated many B2B APIs which tend to be varying degrees of XML, plain and sane to rabbithole insane or worst of all SOAP which apparently is really still a thing people use and take seriously in B2B api context.
Sigh, xml hard at work solving a problem we never seen, but creates such a bloted horrible mess where json would have been simple and better.
I see both sides. The magic of SOAP is you can give a tool a WSDL and it will generate bindings in a language of your choice.
The downside is it has to be pretty complicated to enable the magic, so building it can be complicated, and debugging it is a nightmare. You could say the same about a lot of modern JS, and that's been somewhat solved by amazing tooling.
please think through your API if you are to design an API, the tools will not think for you and you can fool yourself instead...
Swagger will not magically solve anything.
I have seen and experienced that you can really create nonsensical but pretty and auto documented APIs using swagger in no time.
Sigh, xml hard at work solving a problem we never seen, but creates such a bloted horrible mess where json would have been simple and better.