That's cool to have here a synthetic explanation on how Relay can be more familiar.

I think I would just still be more attracted by Appollo framework which is more a redux-like syntax, so more consistent with all the workflow of the apps I used to develop. But maybe Relay has better benchmarks?

Also, if I want to stay REST but with optimist transactions between the backend and frontend, I prefer lighter lib like https://github.com/tonyhb/tectonic or even I just write some fast redux-saga watchers that helps to make my frontend always synchronized when my app calls a mutating db request.