You can separate the view and the backend storage without going graphql. You can build your API around things that make sense on a higher level, like "get lates

You can separate the view and the backend storage without going graphql. You can build your API around things that make sense on a higher level, like "get latest N posts in my timeline" and let the API endpoint figure out how to serve that It's seemingly more work than graphql as you need to actually intentionally build your API, but it gets you fewer, more thought-out usage patterns on the backend that are easier to scale.