I agree and would take it one step further — the structure of the joins is something that should most often come from the schema, not the query. In the same way that the attributes of an entity should be modelled out ahead of time, the relationships between the entities should be as well, and that yields more productive querying and better performance.

We built a GraphQL / SQL hybrid expression language that does just this here: https://docs.gadget.dev/guides/data-access/gelly#gelly , curious what yall think.