GraphQL is dying and I could not be happier. The hype has faded. The conference talks have dried up. The true believers have gone quiet. Teams are quietly migrating back to REST and pretending they never suggested GraphQL in the first place. The fever has broken.
Good. It was a fucking mistake.
The problem it solved did not exist GraphQL was supposed to solve over-fetching. Your REST API returns too much data, they said. You are wasting bandwidth, they said. The mobile clients only need three fields but you are sending back fifty.
I should not need to read a novel to call your endpoint.
If your API documentation spans forty pages, multiple guides, a getting started tutorial, a concepts section, a best practices section, and a troubleshooting FAQ, your API is not well documented. Your API is badly designed. The documentation is compensating for failures that should have been fixed in the API itself.
Good APIs are self-evident. You look at the endpoint, you understand what it does. You look at the request, you understand what to send. You look at the response, you understand what you got back. The documentation exists to confirm what you already intuited, not to explain an incomprehensible system.