In my opinion, it is – among other aspects – also a question of use cases:
- If you have something like an app or other frontend with a connection that is slow and/or has high latency (typical example: a mobile app), GraphQL’s “roundtrip minimisation” can be a big plus. And it can be pretty handy to give the client-side control over the data structure, thus often reducing the number of required API endpoints.
- If it’s rather data exchange between servers, the fact that RESTful APIs are strongly related to HTTP, has advantages such as the semantics of verbs (which GraphQL cannot offer, as you perform several operations with one GraphQL query) and status codes. Plus: you get all the HTTP caching functionality for free, which can be really important in heavily data-driven applications/services. In addition, REST is ubiquitous (although probably most APIs advertised as “RESTful” aren’t, often due to missing support for hypermedia).
