It's funny you should mention Netflix. They demoed something called Falkor two years ago that is/was extremely similar to Relay/GraphQL. It's unfortunate that it's made so little progress in the past two years, but it wouldn't surprise me of the talks on Falkor had influenced or inspired Facebook's implementation.
fwiw Jafar announced last week it would be open sourced in the next couple of weeks [1], and a number of people have access already and are helping with documentation and the like.
Falcor and Relay are conceptually similar but Relay is much more of a query engine, and Falcor isn't so much.
The fact that these two companies came up with the same idea independently just reinforces how truly beneficial it must be.
I can't wait to try Om Next's implementation of this concept in my apps!