I was re-reading Fielding’s PhD dissertation about REST: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

It seems to me that REST is heavily influenced by network protocol design considerations, or put another way, backend biased. REST specifies the media types, i.e., MIME types, but doesn’t have fine-grained cover on how the shape of actual data looks like in the response. It is up to the backend to decide, like you mentioned in the article.

In such a sense, GraphQL is walking the last mile that REST doesn’t do to let client control the response data shape.