For me the main benefit of graphql is to have a common interface for mixed backends. One query seems unified, while it may request data from an SQL DB, the cache, redis, the file system, elastic search, etc.

It makes it very easy to switch backends, or reuse the same query on the client or the server. Microservices have one common standard language to query data, to whatever it wants.

ORMs tried to do that but they work well only for relational data. Plus unless you use JS everywhere, you can use it on the client and the server.