[mbleigh]

TL;DR GraphQL isn't really the problem, untrusted clients executing arbitrarily complex queries is the problem. This is why authz is hard, why rate-limiting is necessary, why "query complexity" calculations are necessary...

At Firebase we chose GraphQL as the basis for our new Data Connect PostgreSQL product (https://firebase.google.com/products-data-connect) despite acknowledging pretty much all of the issues outlined in this article as correct.

GraphQL is an excellent IDL (interface definition language). It's compact, it's flexible (through directives), and there's literally no better way I'm aware of to rapidly construct complex nested relational queries. But the promise of "clients can fetch whatever they want" adds an enormous burden to backend developers because you have to secure yourself against queries of arbitrary shape and complexity.

In reality you don't want clients to "fetch whatever they want" because clients can't be trusted. The path we took is that developers can predefine the queries that are needed for their client, and then only those queries can be executed from an untrusted client.

This approach provides a surprising number of benefits - you get the flexibility of nested queries and field selection, the end-to-end strongly typed structure of a schema-driven API, and the ability to reason about security like it's a custom backend.