If all your experience comes from Apollo Client and Apollo Server, as the author's does, then your opinion is more about Apollo than it is about GraphQL.

You should be using Relay[0] or Isograph[1] on the frontend, and Pothos[2] on the backend (if using Node), to truly experience the benefits of GraphQL.

[0]: https://relay.dev/

[1]: https://isograph.dev/

[2]: https://pothos-graphql.dev/

Incidentally, v0.5.0 of Isograph just came out! https://isograph.dev/blog/2025/12/14/isograph-0.5.0/ There are lots of DevEx wins in this release, such as the ability to create have an autofix create fields for you. (In Isograph, these would be client fields.)

There are also GraphQL interfaces for various databases which can be useful, especially with federation to tie them together into a supergraph.

GraphQL Yoga is also excellent (and you get the whole Guild ecosystem of plugins etc), if you want to go schema-first