It's nice to see some love for Apollo here. It's leagues better than Relay and has definitely been the biggest boon to my development stack in a while. That being said, the article should make it clearer that Apollo is perfectly usable just as a frontend client—you don't have to adopt the backend at all.

The Meteor team really deserves commendations for learning from some of the mistakes in building Meteor. Apollo specifically emphasizes incremental adoptability: you can drop it into an existing project and see benefits almost immediately, without having to refactor/rewrite any of your existing code.

I'd also like to provide a counterpoint to the inevitable complaints about the complexity and low-productivity of a JavaScript. In my experience, once you've paid the initial cost of learning these tools you can become extremely productive. As a freelance developer who is paid a flat rate for projects, I'm directly incentivized to find an efficient stack and the modern JavaScript stack is definitely it.

Specifically, my stack these days is Django + Graphene + React + Redux + Apollo. It's insanely high productivity: I can usually have the basics of an app built within a few hours of starting.