When we talk about advantages of GraphQL we often hear one-liners such as “only fetch what you need,” “only requires one generic endpoint,” “data source agnostic,” or “more flexibility for developers.” But as always things are more subtle than a one-liner could ever describe.
Generic and flexible are the key words here and it’s important to realize that it’s hard to keep generic APIs performant. Performance is the number one reason that someone would write a highly customized endpoint in REST (e.g. to join specific data together) and that is exactly what GraphQL tries to eliminate. In other words, it’s