GraphQL and SQL are not comparable or competing technologies. GraphQL is more analogous to a REST API. GraphQL can use SQL under the hood, or you can even hand serve the bytes (tongue in cheek here). It's just an over-the-network protocol to serve data.

a Node.JS server might use SQL directly or call out to a GraphQL API, but I literally don't think it's possible to let client-side JavaScript (safely) call a SQL database server directly.

GraphQL and SQL are about as related as Java and Javascript

So you have no idea about web dev?