I know this is an ancient ticket, sorry for resurrecting.
I am too unable to get rest-server (0.9.7) working (on CentOS 8). It does seem like a bug in rest-server though.
Is this project still maintained/alive? If yes, it would be fantastic to have binaries for version 0.9.8 on GitHub too.
Edit: It only works if I run restic on the same server where “rest-server” is running (i.e. rest:http://localhost:8000 and not rest:http://10.10.10.10:8000). Changing the --listen parameter doesn’t help either (i.e. 0.0.0.0:8000).