It's funny you should mention Netflix. They demoed something called Falkor two years ago that is/was extremely similar to Relay/GraphQL. It's unfortunate that it's made so little progress in the past two years, but it wouldn't surprise me of the talks on Falkor had influenced or inspired Facebook's implementation.

For those that want links:

https://twitter.com/falcorjs

http://moduscreate.com/falcor-mvc-for-an-asynchronous-world

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8UgDZ4rXBU