Your problem isn't GraphQL. It's that your team is doing exactly the opposite of what's supposed to be done. You don't write GraphQL on top of a REST API. One of the many advantages of GraphQL is that if there are a few fields that are expensive to compute and the frontend doesn't them, it wouldn't ask for it and the backend can skip computing them. If you just use it as a wrapper for a REST API, you forgo this (any many other) benefits.