Are you really surprised though? Like you alluded, people use Kubernetes and Bazel just because it has the big ol' G stamp on it. GraphQL is no different
(Well... slightly different. It's the FB stamp, not the G stamp)
I just picked java up again recently and it's really OK now. I'd have used it for my project but spring boot doesn't have an auto-generated admin like django so I binned it.
(Well... slightly different. It's the FB stamp, not the G stamp)