I'm not following if you think GraphQL is a bad fit still, but we used GraphQL with the BFF pattern, and it was nice to use from Frontend to BFF. The backend services would use REST or whatever appropriate behind the BFF.
I see GraphQL as unneeded if you already have a BFF managed by front teams.
Going with basic REST gives you simpler caching/optimisation paths, more straightforward mapping between the front request and the backend calls, and it makes it easier for other teams to look at what you’re doing and comment on/fix stuff as needed. GraphQL would be pure syntax sugar, and I’m not sure it would be worth the trade-off.
> more straightforward mapping between the front request and the backend calls,
I disagree, at least compared to something like Apollo Server or Hasura.
The mapping is much easier, especially if you consider things like resolvers having parts of the schema going to different backend servers, API endpoints, separate caching, etc.
We tried to do this manually via a REST server, and found that we were just reinventing something like Apollo, but badly.
