[foobarian]

> changes in query patterns necessarily involve the backend team,

How does this follow? A client team can decide to e.g. put up a cross-sell shelf on a low-traffic page by calling a REST endpoint with tons of details and you have the same problem. I don't see the difference in any of these discussions, the only thing different is the schema syntax (graphql vs. openapi)

[int_19h]

GQL is far more flexible wrt what kind of queries it can do (and yes, it can be constrained, but this flexibility is the whole point). Which means that turning a cheap query into an expensive one accidentally is very easy.

A hand-coded REST endpoint will give you a bunch of predefined options for filtering, sorting etc, and the dev who implements it will generally assume that all of those can be used, and write the backing query (and create indices) accordingly.

[RHSeeger]

> and yes, it can be constrained, but this flexibility is the whole point

Flexibility within the constraints of what the back end can safely support.

To me, the "whole point" of GraphQL is to be able to have the client ask for only the data they need, rather than have a REST API that returns _everything_ and letting the front end throw away what they don't need (which incurs more load).

If you can't support returning certain configurations of data, then... don't.