[ojkelly]

There’s an inherent amount of complexity with two (or more) systems talking to each other over a network. You can shift the balance from one to the other, but it’s always there.

GraphQL pushes complexity into the backend where it’s arguably easier to manage, in return the frontend can have more flexibility and autonomy as a client.

REST pushes the complexity to the frontend requiring clients to orchestrate multiple calls, and reconcile the data models in the API to their own.

GraphQL got a lot of early praise for having good tooling that can provided end-to-end type safety, autogenerated client and server frameworks, and so on. OpenAPI has more or less caught up on this front now.

You can’t just take a REST api and convert it into a GraphQL api. Like going from dynamic to static types, with GraphQL it pays off to define your data model and reuse it throughout the API.

I’ve seen simple things like using the same field name, or same set of fields for a given type get bikeshedded for months. You can get with this for REST APIs, but not GraphQL.