[JMTQp8lwXL]

Apollo is more than just GraphQL -- it has built-in caching, and gives you booleans for loading state, and more. If you were to roll your own wrapper around window.fetch, for a simpler facade to work with (when making network requests in React), you'd end up with something like Apollo's interface. And that really useful API surface has nothing to do with GraphQL as a specification.

I used to roll all of this stuff from Redux, with actions, reducers, the whole 9 yards. Apollo let me gut all of that-- since I was only using Redux to store data retrieved over the network. Now I'm not hear to preach Apollo specifically, but it's the only client I've worked with, and I can achieve higher productivity with it than working a lower level.