This is the kind of task where I feel like GraphQL should shine in theory. In practice, it feels like we don't really have good tooling for this kind of stuff,

This is the kind of task where I feel like GraphQL should shine in theory. In practice, it feels like we don't really have good tooling for this kind of stuff, and you end up writing everything DIY. There are also some annoying limitations in the GraphQL schema and query languages, so you might end up wanting to compile/generate those from something else. The promises there, but the implementation is quite a headache without proper tooling/library/framework support.