[strken]

This may be controversial, but I don't think REST is significantly simpler when implemented in a real project.

The setup for GraphQL takes longer than for REST because the ecosystem is still much younger, meaning you have to write some abstractions and helpers yourself. Once that's done, however, adding new types and new actions/mutations is about as hard in each and takes roughly the same amount of code. However, in GraphQL the maintenance cost from "hey, can you add X to the Y endpoint?" is dramatically reduced, and Apollo can save you from a lot of bugs by validating queries against the schema at compile time.