[troupo]

Dataloaders replace N+1 with E queries (where E is the number of separate entity types to fetch) and an in-memory merging of all datasets (huge if you're not careful).

They are a solution, but not necessarily a good one. And GraphQL doesn't lend itself to goos solutions.

[swid]

N+1 only makes sense for E=2. For each parent in the list, fetch the child’s data. If there were multiple children, or if the children had their own children fetched 1 at a time, it would no longer be N+1.

So I think 1+1 (or 1+N/batch size) is still correct.