One place I was at we used REST with a hydration service that ran as a proxy in front of the requests. That gave us most of the benefits of GraphQL and we only implemented it for the main resources (users, photos, and maybe one other thing). To minimize latency/faults the hydration service ran locally on every webapp/API server. I wasn't around for far too long after though to see how it turned out as it grew (if it did at all, the company sort-of went defunct--development-wise anyway).
I also recall, we had similar N+1 query problems in the REST API endpoints irrespective of hydrating the returned resources.
The biggest benefit of GraphQL I can see from a user perspective is that it lowers total latency especially on mobile with fewer round trips.
I currently use GraphQL and have no problems with it specifically, I was merely sharing an experience using REST. Perhaps it adds a bit of latency/overhead due to the implementation/language that's used but with larger requests rounds downward.
I also recall, we had similar N+1 query problems in the REST API endpoints irrespective of hydrating the returned resources.
The biggest benefit of GraphQL I can see from a user perspective is that it lowers total latency especially on mobile with fewer round trips.