I had an eerily similar experience with GraphQL where by the end of "productionizing" the backend to support the client load, were using whatever their equivale

I had an eerily similar experience with GraphQL where by the end of "productionizing" the backend to support the client load, were using whatever their equivalent of cached/persisted queries is called (sorry I can't recall their terms for this). We had ultimately come full circle to something that was harder to use than a REST API but also more complicated at every layer.