[gavinray]

  > My sense for this has been like GraphQL was invented out of the frustration of the frontend team needing to rely on backend teams for adding/changing APIs.

GraphQL was borne out of the frustration of backend teams not DOCUMENTING their API changes.

It's no different ideologically from gRPC, OpenAPI, or OData -- except for the ability to select subsets of fields, which not all of those provide.

Just a type-documented API that the server allows clients to introspect and ask for a listing of operations + schema types.

GQL resolvers are the same code that you'd find behind endpoint handlers for REST "POST /users/1", etc