[chrischen]

Well, no, Relay is how GraphQL is meant to be used and is Facebook's client implementation and quite opinionated. Apollo and others came around to be less opinionated (and thus allowed people to re-use their old REST style designs) in GraphQL.

You can in fact just curl a GraphQL API. In simple projects where I don't need caching I just use the REST library and make a simple HTTP request with a graphql query string. I get back a JSON object to consume.