GraphQL
Had promise. Too bloated for its own good while lacking important functionality.
GraphQL promised to solve over-fetching and give frontend teams control over their data requirements. In practice, it introduced a layer of complexity that outweighed its benefits for most applications.
The schema-first approach sounds elegant until you need real-time subscriptions, file uploads, or caching strategies that REST handles natively. Every GraphQL project we've seen ends up reinventing solutions for problems that were already solved. The tooling overhead — schema stitching, code generation, resolver plumbing — adds friction without proportional value.
REST with TypeScript contracts gives you the type safety that was supposed to be GraphQL's killer feature, without the runtime overhead. For the rare case where clients genuinely need flexible queries over large datasets, a purpose-built query layer beats shoehorning everything through a single /graphql endpoint.