Not planning on getting dragged into a debate about whether GraphQL is a good tech choice here (even though I won't pretend i'm not a massive fanboy). But the "with-apollo" Next.js example used as a reference (and then decried as being a bad experience and unscalable), is a pretty bad representation of how it can feel to use GraphQL with Next.js.

I've never used Apollo in anger, but i've used Relay with Next.js for a few projects and it's been a dream. The biggest downside has been the size overhead of the Relay client itself (approx 40kb over the network), and the size of the serialized data (but that's the same price you'd be paying whether you were using GraphQL or not, just an unfortunate reality of the hydration model).