This comment tells me exactly what I always wanted to know about GraphQL. I'm working on a project where the front-end needs complex combinations of queries for relations between objects with various properties of different data sets. Our fairly simple REST backend with graph DB provides exactly what the front-end needs, but it does mean there's a tight coupling between the front and back ends.

So every once in a while, the question comes up whether we shouldn't be using GraphQL for this, and every time we end up unsure where to start, how to implement it, or what the actual benefits would be. We control both front and back end, and REST works fine for us.

I guess if we ever want to make our back end usable by other applications, GraphQL might become more useful to us, but until then, it seems like it's mostly a lot of extra work and complexity that we don't need.

GraphQL seems most useful when you're using something that supports it out of the box.