[deegles]

I think you answered your own question... GraphQL and similar are meant to push complexity to the endpoint partly in order to not tax resource-constrained clients. If that's part of your requirements then it's a great fit, otherwise your points are valid.

[KirinDave]

In a more perfect world, it'd make sense. Mutations in particular make lots of sense because it narrows the scope of any required transactional semantics.

But the fact that I've only seen one implementation correctly implement the query semantics worries me deeply. At first I assumed I was using bad libraries! But soon I realized that lots of devs were simply shipping significantly less efficient servers to production.