This is my experience as well. We briefly worked with GraphQL for one of our smaller projects. One of the biggest shortcomings of the API we created was that there was an incredibly large learning curve for teams/people not interested in using GraphQL. Instead of using the sensible features of GraphQL queries, the other team consuming our API were writing the most verbose queries they possibly could, not utilizing any of the nice convenience operations that GraphQL offers.
They were no doubt frustrated with what they thought was a needless hassle compared to REST, and I myself found a lot of the query building pretty tedious.
That's interesting, because as a frontend engineer, I find most RESTful APIs to introduce more "needless hassle", mostly in the form of making me send multiple requests to get data multiple levels deep and then consolidating it on the frontend, rather than just sending me what I want to begin with.
I agree with query building being tedious, though I'm working on a query builder helper library to make this less painful. Hopefully at some point I can open source it.
They were no doubt frustrated with what they thought was a needless hassle compared to REST, and I myself found a lot of the query building pretty tedious.