GraphQL seems to be mostly touted as "You can do richer queries!". which is definitely true, but not the key factor of what makes it awesome in my experience.

GraphQL seems to be mostly touted as "You can do richer queries!". which is definitely true, but not the key factor of what makes it awesome in my experience. Much more important to me is how it allows the backend and frontend to work closer together. I can simply send the frontend developers my schema and then they know exactly what each endpoint returns, down to the exact type of the returned keys. There's no more back and forth on what the data for a new endpoint is supposed to look like. Either the backend devs take lead and hand a schema to the frontend devs, or the frontend devs take the lead and hand a schema to the backend devs. Other than that there's quite a lot of really cool tooling. On the backend (python/django) I'm no longer needing to write long-winded serializers for each specific kind of view. I can simply make a query object that returns the right database query. On the frontend (typescript/react) they no longer need to write types for each API view, they can simply hand the schema to a code generator and get a file out declaring all the types the API deals with. GraphiQL is awesome for both frontend and backend devs, At the very least it's a tidy small editor for queries. It allows you to run queries as you're developing or testing views. The documentation pane shows all the return types and expected arguments and types even if you don't put any effort into documenting anything. If you do put effort into documenting it becomes a powerful API documentation that's be easy to keep up-to date. We're still in the early days of using graphQL but what I've seen so far certainly is worth the growing pains we're going through. The only real nitpick I have is the poor documentation of graphene-python, quite a lot of crucial use cases have you running around stack overflow and the source code to find answers. The case that gave us the most trouble so far (backend and frontend) is what to do with errors. We've gone the route of having views returning a union of the result and a global error type, which seems to be working nicely so far. Of course the richer queries are nice too, but for us they seem to be mostly limited to making queries return less info when possible. e.g. when querying users you don't always need to return the entire user, which graphQL supports nicely, allowing you to elude profile photos or other expensive-to-calculate-columns whenever needed.