Architecture · 2015–2023 · Platform Wars
GraphQL Everywhere
Clients ask for exactly what they need — and sometimes invent a second backend team to make that safe.
GraphQL mutated API design for product-heavy frontends that hated over-fetching. The everywhere hype cooled; it stuck as a niche API layer. It failed as a global REST replacement because caching, authorization, and N+1 resolvers are hard at scale.
Patterns
Context
Frameworks fought for the runtime
Front-end frameworks consolidated power; TypeScript became table stakes; Next and friends absorbed routing, data, and deploy gravity. Serverless and Jamstack rebranded old ideas with better CDNs, then cooled when auth and personalization refused to stay static. Blockchain-for-CRUD and big-bang rewrites collected dumb budgets. The winners were boring platforms with ecosystems — React gravity, Rust where systems care, Vite for greenfield bundling. The losers were narratives that skipped product-market fit or treated every App Router rewrite as destiny.