How and why GraphQL will influence the Sourcehut alpha

I don't understand the attraction to Graphql. (I do understand it if maybe you actually want the things that gRPC or Thrift etc gives you)

It seems like exactly the ORM solution/problem but even more abstract and less under control since it pushes the orm out to browser clients and the frontend devs.

ORM suffer from being at beyond arms length from the query analyzer in the database server.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_optimization

A query optimizer that's been tuned over decades by pretty serious people.

Bad queries, overfetching, sudden performance cliffs everywhere.

Graphql actually adds another query language on top of the normal orm problem. (Maybe the answer is that graphql is so simple by design that it has no dark corners but that seems like a matter of mathematical proof that I haven't seen alluded to).

Why is graphql not going to have exactly this problem as we see people actually start to work seriously with it?

Four or five implementations in javascript, haskell and now go. From what I could see none of them were mentioning query optimization as an aspiration.

GraphQL was developed by Facebook to be used in conjunction with their frontend GraphQL client library called Relay. Most people opt Apollo + Redux because they were more active early on in releasing open source, and people argue it is an easier learning curve. IMO Relay is a huge win for the frontend to deal with data dependencies; and is a much better design than Apollo + Redux.

GraphQL formalizes the contract between front and back end in a very readable and maintainable way, so they can evolve in parallel and reconcile changes in a predictable, structured place (the GraphQL schema and resolvers). And it allows the frontend, with Relay, to deal with data dependencies in a very elegant and performant way.