In this case, you gain the Apollo helpers around entity management, caching, etc. and the components they've already created for sending queries & mutations – s

In this case, you gain the Apollo helpers around entity management, caching, etc. and the components they've already created for sending queries & mutations – so the ecosystem basically. Also if you're planning in the future to migrate the API to GraphQL, and this is just a first step, you'll be able to leave most of the frontend code you wrote the same and just switch out the "link" part. It's kinda like how most languages have generic database adapters where you don't need to think about whether you're talking to MySQL/Postgres/SQLite etc. most of the time.