[mambodog]

Fair enough. What I'm trying to get at is that you need to pay attention to the cost of the real world queries which are actually being executed against your API, and then optimize. I'm not sure that SQL is a magic bullet there either (you can still request too much data at once, for example).

In practice this probably means adding some logging of how long requests take and graphing it (say, 95th percentile request time) from time to time to spot pathological queries. Even better if you can automate it. I think this is stuff that everyone should be doing (after a certain stage), regardless of whether you are using GraphQL or a bespoke JSON API.