My interpretation was: “We did ReST trying to follow dogma and ended up with a badly designed API that din’t fit our needs. Switching to a tech with less dogma on how to do things led us to a better API-design with a better fit” (inferring some context from my own experience here, could be wrong)
In the end I would guess you can end up in a similar place with a standard fetch-json design if you just ignore ReST dogma and focus on getting the API into a shape that fits the need.
Not saying ReST dogma is necessarily wrong, or bad, just that it’s easy to get lost in design when focusing more on learning others design than understanding the actual problem you’re trying to solve.
For reference we’re switching from the non dogmatic get/post requests over http to graphql and it’s been equally good for us too for different reasons.
Also consider that a second implementation of a system is always going to be cleaner than the first because you actually know what you need to do. This is an inherent bias inherent to any GraphQL migration story.
In the end I would guess you can end up in a similar place with a standard fetch-json design if you just ignore ReST dogma and focus on getting the API into a shape that fits the need.
Not saying ReST dogma is necessarily wrong, or bad, just that it’s easy to get lost in design when focusing more on learning others design than understanding the actual problem you’re trying to solve.