My understanding is the json type stuff is a language specific workaround and not part of the standard. I have .NET, go, node.js, and others and while I could make any one of those languages work with specific changes they would not necessarily inter-operate for free or per the standard. I would hate to build heavily on workarounds that I feel should be in-built. At some point we just reinventing the wheel but in a more fragile way. I dont believe the arbitrary json was in the .NET version I was using which is what would expose data to be consumed via node.js (and other .net clients). Frankly it was easier to just implement a simple rest api that did exactly what was expected.

What I sort of what is to be able to craft a query against a large set of objects like a customer/location/asset hierarchy and filter on different levels like sql query without it being in a database. I might have 10 different orthogonal dimensions with foreign keys than can be returned and filtered against. I'm trying to avoid pulling the complete object hierarchy only for it to filter out some of the data after the fact and then finally return the expected json format. Accessing some objects might be very expensive so being able to filter data as part of the query request rather than afterwords would speed things up. These actions are usually quite hard to do in libraries I've used. Maybe if you only use javascript/node.js, I don't know its not what I've need to start with. I may have misinterpreted what GraphQL was for if it is not for querying nearly arbitrary object graphs and returning json that the client wants returned.