Unfortunately, easy to hit that with say GraphQL where each client request can resolve to dozens of db selects vs a single hand written/tuned SQL select.
Now you get into the issues of tracing, request failures and retries, payload size (only json? really..) etc.
But I do agree that a super optimized sql for a a specific purpose has it's performance benefit
[0]: https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/issues/678
[1]: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/28296
[2]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v21.1/stream-data-out-of-...