GraphQL is safer than SQL, but it can't be more performant, as it gets translated to SQL server-side.

That said, you don't have to choose only one of the two. At my company we use a GraphQL backend for simple SELECTs which are the vast majority of front-end queries - no reason to involve a backend engineer for them. However, traditional backend calls are used for data modification commands (to enforce business rules server-side) and for performance-critical queries (to tune the raw SQL query/ies as necessary).