It replaced Falcor [1] which was extremely similar to GraphQL but also entirely incompatible, and was owned and maintained almost solely by Netflix staff, with GraphQL which has a large community of developers and users. Released to the public at nearly the same time, after several years in the hands of open source communities the verdict seemed to be: Falcor lost, GraphQL won. In theory this saves Netflix continuing maintenance costs of Falcor (which it can now entirely deprecate/stop work on, though there is no current warning in the repo other than maybe a comment in Issue #1016 [2]), and instead externalize more overall maintenance work to the much larger GraphQL community (including teams like Apollo and at Meta).

[1] https://github.com/Netflix/falcor

[2] https://github.com/Netflix/falcor/issues/1016#issuecomment-1...