> GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.

This is almost exactly how I feel about Kubernetes

I have worked at companies with more kubernetes pods than customers. They loved graphql too.

That explains some of the experiences ive seen at small companies! From my pov it was "design-by-resume." People wanted to play w tech for their next job, with less concern for what the business needed.

This is the classic example of the quote:

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

Can we stop pulling this quote out every time someone brings up a legitimate pain point?

There's actually a well-known effect in standards, that large orgs want to overcomplicate them, as having implemented a bunch of overcomplicated standards becomes part of their moat against competitors. This is definitely done deliberately; the most blatant example is Office Open XML but it's true of others too. They know that they have the staff to waste effort on it, and others don't.

I'm not sure anyone is thinking 'lets open source our most dumb ideas to hobble potential competition' - but they would do it if they thought of it.