The big win of using GraphQL, at least for me, is not the performance, but the developer experience. I can craft a query in Graphiql, paste it into my application, and from there generate Flow types for the query response. Make a breaking change to my graphql API? Flow types will fail CI tests until I fix any dependent client code. All of this works pretty nicely out of the box, and it’s leaps and bounds better than my past experience with homegrown rest APIs.
You mean frontend developer experience. The backend developers I interact with are not too enthusiastic on moving the complexity from the frontend to the backend when using GQL.
From my experience the backend also becomes simpler because it standardizes a lot of patterns, especially regarding subscriptions. I have a feeling any backend developer that thinks GraphQL is a significant increase in complexity is just reluctant to learn a new technology.
It's a shift from supporting some defined, limited set of behavior to supporting a much broader set of possible behavior, to the point that it likely can't practically be fully enumerated. If that's somehow not the case, then I'm not sure what you're using GraphQL for, since that's its whole thing.
