Limited error handling mechanism in Apollo and our backend GraphQL library means I can't use then/catch to reliably handle both network and server errors. Apollo also hijacks state management and somehow decides when to fetch over the network or render a cached response, with no particular logic I can deduce or find documentation for. Then there's the thousand lines of repetitive query code that is a joy to read/write/manage.

Sounds like the problem is with your client/server library choices and not with GraphQL as a concept. Your original comment implied the latter.

I think we handle our GraphQL like we do our SQL -- handle the repetitive queries as templates. I'm curious now and will dig into the repo tonight.

The state management is a problem by default. We wrote our own cache driver to fix it, which is pretty well documented thankfully. "Un-magic it" is a phrase we use a lot.