It really isn't just an optimization, though. I actually work at a relatively small team (< 10 developers) and we're having a lot of success with GraphQL. For a

It really isn't just an optimization, though. I actually work at a relatively small team (< 10 developers) and we're having a lot of success with GraphQL. For a variety of reasons we ended up moving to a microservices approach, and GraphQL has worked great for us for aggregating those services. It's not much more work than what a REST API with Swagger docs would be, but the tooling is a lot better and the schema is much more powerful. With a REST API, we would just have a bunch of endpoints and some basic code generation as a time saver for clients. With a GraphQL schema, we have the relationships between all of our data well defined and it's super easy to continue adding onto. There's more of an upfront investment, but I'm pretty confident it's already saved us time. At the same time, I agree that it's overly hyped. It's not some magic bullet, and there's definitely a learning curve. It's a really powerful tool though, much more than just an optimization.