I think GraphQL is just an way to bully the efforts of the W3C to standardize web technologies. It not just is non-standard, also is breaks any advantage of the HATEOAS principle.
If I have to write something that’s REST-ish, I’ll do my damnedest to make sure it’s HATEOAS, but in my experience, the number of developers who can consistently produce useful and consistent HATEOAS APIs is…vanishingly small.
I can learn more about an API from its GraphQL schema than most of the other API documentation (like OAS/Swagger or RAML) out there.
Because relatively few developers truly understand HATEOAS let alone REST. I think that did play a small part in the increased popularity of GraphQL.