I think that it might be because the difference is mostly in how we work together. With GQL your frontend and backend engineers are always happy, with Rest they are always at each others throats to deliver. This is because GQL gives your teams the tools they want. On the frontend you get the data access without ever having to talk with your backend, on the backend you get the load data without ever having to talk with your frontend. So both your frontend and your backend can focus on what they do best without ever talking with eachother.
Obviously that's not exactly how it works, but if you give your frontend engineers the full query abilities of GQL and your backend the ability to monitor and then fix bottlenecks through the GQL load tools you simply remove a lot of the conflict zones in modern development.
You can do everything you can with GQL with Rest, but you're not going to want to do it. And speaking from experience, you're not going to want to do it with Odata either unless Microsoft magically improves the experience after 10 years of it sucking.
Obviously that's not exactly how it works, but if you give your frontend engineers the full query abilities of GQL and your backend the ability to monitor and then fix bottlenecks through the GQL load tools you simply remove a lot of the conflict zones in modern development.
You can do everything you can with GQL with Rest, but you're not going to want to do it. And speaking from experience, you're not going to want to do it with Odata either unless Microsoft magically improves the experience after 10 years of it sucking.