More than likely, the business is unhappy with the terms of the recruiter's agreement. These guys will do all sorts of things with contractors like add a 30% commission on top of your hourly fee and bake in a clause entitling the recuiter to a bonus equal to 20% of your salary if the company decides to hire you full time.
You will probably not be offered this position any way except through the recruiter.
My advice is to continue your search, and only work with embedded recruiters who are paid hourly or salary for their services. These recruiters will have corporate email addresses matching the companies they represent.
"There is no "correct" separate from usefulness in communication."
I think you may have misunderstood your source. Subjective truth is only half of the equation. The other half is testing rational models against experience. If you understand the constraints of REST, you understand that it has implications not met by the API in question and thus claims to be something which it clearly is not.
Just because I tell you I'm a duck doesn't mean I'm a duck.
Saw Subbu speak at RestFest on Saturday. His talk seemed to promote REST as a set of constraints which produces a set of benefits. He argues that choosing a subset of constraints to achieve a subset of benefits is perfectly valid.
I would add that you must first have a deep understanding of the constraints and their associated benefits in order to make those types of informed decisions about your system's architecture. In my experience, the constraints are so orthogonal that a great number of the benefits of a system created using the REST architectural style only become evident in the overlap as the constraints empower each other.
Combining these constraints can elicit new benefits.
You do know that PHP has built-in min and max functions, right?
And array_map.
And array_walk.
And array_filter.
And array_reduce.
And array_slice.
And array_unique.
And array_search.
And range.
And empty.
And is_object.
And is_array.
0 domain specific media types (application/json)
1 domain specific media type (application/vnd.github+json)
many domain specific media types (application/vnd.github-issue.text+json, ...)
If you accept those constraints which you readily understand and discard those which require great discipline to master, you are unlikely to make informed decisions about your software's architecture.
REST is a style, not a pattern. The application of this manner of classification to application architectures on the web was the broader goal of Fielding's dissertation, titled "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures".
[1] https://github.com/danthegoodman1/bloomsearch