The issue I've seen with GraphQL isn't necessarily the count of queries run, but rather the performance or said queries (i.e. most SQL queries are not performant without proper indexes for the specific use case, but GraphQL allows lots of flexibility in what queries users can run.)

Yes - one needs to ensure that the data is well indexed - that is reasonable.

But indices does not need to yield a single result. It is OK that indices reduce the result set to tens or couple of hundreds of result. That is well within the performance requirements (... of our app)