Data fetching on the web still sucks

Really learning the "Ember Way" to do things can reduce some of the friction the author mentions.

Ember Data can allow you to talk to multiple api backends (differing schemas) while presenting the same model to your UI. If you use the default JsonApi[0] based backend, you get a lot of things for free: powerful filtering, side loading data (relationships), consistent error handling. Sometimes it can be chatty, but that's a spot where HTTP2 can help.

Use ember-concurrency add-on and you have a nice way to manage your requests, things like de-bouncing, handling loading spinners, etc.

[0]https://jsonapi.org/format/

Sounds like 30 GiB RAM for 1 million concurrent users is not unreasonable:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/17453704

Solving the mentioned problems in the article for best practices around fragments is on our near future roadmap, but there are some other points here that we've worked on that especially Apollo did not (yet)

Request batching is in my humble opinion not quite needed with GraphQL and especially with HTTP/2 and edge caching via persisted queries, however we have stronger guarantees around commutative application of responses from the server.

We also have optimistic updates and a lot of intuitive safe guards around how these and other updates are applied to all normalised data. They're applied in a pre-determined order and optimistic updates are applied in such a way that the optimistic/temporary data can never be mixed with "permanent" data in the cache. It also prevents races by queueing up queries that would otherwise overwrite optimistic data accidentally and defers them up until all optimistic updates are completed, which will all settle in a single batch, rather than one by one.

I find this article really interesting since it seems to summarise a lot of the efforts that we've also identified as "weaknesses" in normalised caching and GraphQL data fetching, and common problems that come up during development with data fetching clients that aren't aware of these issues.

Together with React and their (still experimental / upcoming) Suspense API it's actually rather easy to build consistent loading experiences as well. The same goes for Vue 3's Suspense boundaries too.

Edit: Also this all being said, in most cases Relay actually also does a great job on most of the criticism that the author lays out here, so if the only complaint that a reader here picks up are the DX around fragments and nothing else applies this once again shows how solid Relay can be as well.

Re: parent, I also was surprised to see Relay dismissed on the list, it solves every problem they bring up in the list, perhaps maybe not the real-time aspects

Overall react-query is impressive for data fetching, but I’ve run into issues with mutations and cache invalidation.