The dealbreaker here is having to do this dance for every nested field on every entity, and having to write a separate backend query for each separate front-end use-case for a single entity.

It just isn’t feasible to write everything out when the schema has >30 entities, some with N:M relations, and when queries routinely go several levels deep to fetch dozens of joined fields at every level. The boilerplate overhead is too much.

A natively GraphQL database makes such queries a magnitude less verbose to write out, and all the queries can stay in the frontend (or can become persisted queries on a GraphQL ”middle-end” server).

Hasura, a GraphQL server, uses exactly this technique to transform final query results into JSON in PG before bringing back into local memory.