Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if this was ironic or not but it made me chuckle. Many people actually DO use technologies that are absolutely not required but which bring incidental complexity because it's fun and hot right now. Seriously, graphQL is perhaps worth considering for maximum 10% of projects out there.
I'm very curious as to where you got that statistic. I understand that we programmers are often very resistant to change, but there's nothing inherently wrong with using something new. If someone feels the benefits are worth the learning costs, then they are free to go ahead and use "X" technology...
GraphQL reminds me of the NOSQL movement. Everyone wanted to try one of these systems, even when they were completely broken at the time (e.g mongodb) And yet, most apps will do just fine with a classical SQL DB and all the comfortable features you can use to speed up development at the cost of scalability (transactions, locks, listen/notify, etc). It's just not a pain point most app ever encounter.
Let me rephrase: How many times was the JSON payload bulkiness in the top 3 performance killers of your app? The answer is 0 for me, after developping dozens of apps. Although to be fair, GraphQL is not as extreme as the NoSQL movement at the time, as it's still a valid alternative even for some apps that are not at Facebook/Netflix scale and the very opinionated approach will be a comfort for many people compared to REST. I'm just strongly reacting to the "duh, of course you should use graphQL instead of REST" fad.