I see GraphQL and other tools created by FAANG companies being used all the time by 1-3 person teams. Their applications are often slow and poorly made. I say that because initially I felt like maybe I wasn't being "professional" if I didn't use these tools, but actually using their applications reassured me that I was going in the right direction.

I see people use GraphQL as the new ORM. I see it used by people who don't have that much experience with databases. I see it used by people who have nothing much to do. It is sometimes about cost requirements. You can just spin up one of those automatic graphql servers that creates the entire backend for you. Sure it doesn't have any logic or security or performance, but it was quick to get up and going and the client is not experienced enough to notice in the beginning. It is often used with Apollo client, so these inexperienced developers then have all kinds of caching issues due to the automatic caching the client does that they don't really understand.

I see it having an application at FAANG scale, where there are teams of front end and back end people, and front-end people can just create the UI without talking to the back-end people. I see it being used at places with enough scale to have multiple graph databases, not SQL databases, or multiple types of databases that need to be unified.

That isn't where it is used in most cases though. It ends up being a very limited version of SQL that is slow. I think it would be good for maybe a public API.