I have strong agreement here and would add reasoning about auth flow through nested resolvers is one of the biggest challenges because it adds so much mental overhead. The reason is that a resolver may be called through completely different contexts and you have to account for that

The complexity and time lost to thinking is just not worth it, especially once you ship your GarphQL app to production, you are locking down the request fields anyway (or you're keeping yourself open for more pain)

I even wrote a zero-dependency auth helpers package and that was not enough for me to keep at it

https://github.com/verdverm/graphql-autharoo

Like OP says, pretty much everything GraphQL can do, you can do better without GraphQL