GraphQL has exploded in popularity since its open-source announcement in 2015. For developers who had spent a lot of time managing data transformations from their back-end infrastructure to match front-end product needs, GraphQL felt like a tremendous step forwards. Gone were the days of hand-writing BFFs to manage problems of over-fetching.
A lot of value proposition arguments around GraphQL have been about over/under fetching, getting the data shape you ask for, etc. But I think GraphQL provides us more than that—it gives us an opportunity to raise the level of abstraction of our domain, and by doing so allow us to write more robust applications that accurately model the problems we face in the real world (changing requirements, one-off issues).
An underappreciated feature of GraphQL is its type system, and in particular features like [union types](https: