Not quite. There is an advantage to being "chatty" that GraphQL proponents don't often mention IMO. You can load balance each of those join requests, cache those GET requests even if they make up only a part of the overall query, shard the storage to multiple servers, rate limit, etc. Spreading requests is usually a good thing; with HTTP/2 the overhead of those extra requests is extremely low as well. It allows sharded processing with approx equal load between nodes at the backend.

Its much easier to define SLA's and manage your traffic profile/platform when the load of each "query" is definitely quantifiable and granular - unlike a GraphQL query.

Then people come to me and say - well you can pre-can your GraphQL queries so that you know which queries are going to be run therefore you have known performance. At which point I say - why not just make a specialised REST endpoint with that query inside it?

I see it as a good backend-for-frontend adapter technology where a bulk query can be sharded into individual smaller ones using core backend services for large use-case specific views. If a query uses too much resources then the GraphQL server and/or a client ID can be rate limited by the backend servers, etc. Which is why I think its mainly a JS thing to date IMO - it doesn't solve many core problems for most backends - it solves typical front-ender dev's issues who can't/don't want to write server side code.