Getting a user id through REST API: vicious circle, or how to get this user id just from his email?

Good catch, thanks!

IMHO, still quite strange that "To retrieve all details for a particular user", one needs to "send a GET request to the /@users endpoint and append the user id to the URL" : we are bitten if we precisely are interested in this user id detail. It would be nice if we could retrieve all details for a particular user from the other fields, at least the email one which uniquely identifies a user and is the key one in case of email login enabled.