Client side GraphQL is harder than REST, though I wouldn’t define it hard in general. Whereas with REST one only needs to update the data model for the response, GraphQL also requires that the request itself is also updated. It gets more complex if the client wants to take advantage of hashed queries and now there’s all this work needed to upload the queries to some backend service. This is from my own experience — I haven’t worked with Apollo to know how much of this process is simplified for you.
The situation you are referring to is actually a great plus, If you change the data model in you backend, you client consume it and thus depend on it, so you still have to change the frontend code anyway, knowing exactly what you can ask and how it will come back makes it a very powerful developer experience with a lot of test that don’t need to be write thanks to tooling around a type system and a faster feedback loop.
Oh, I’m not suggesting that it’s a worse way to do web requests at all. I genuinely enjoyed working with GraphQL despite all the build/CI headaches it can potentially cause. I was really addressing the sole point of difficulty of working with REST vs GraphQL and I’d unquestionably say REST is easier. It’s not a statement of which one is better or worse.
