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The quiet death of the REST vs GraphQL debate

For years, "REST or GraphQL" was the API architecture debate. It's mostly over now, and not because either side won.

What happened instead

Most teams settled into a pragmatic middle: REST for simple CRUD, a typed query layer for anything read-heavy, and neither camp cares much about ideological purity anymore.

The real shift is that schema-first development won, regardless of transport. Whether the actual bytes on the wire are REST or GraphQL matters less than whether your client and server agree on a shared, generated contract.

Where this leaves you

If you're starting something new today, the honest answer is: pick whichever your team already knows, generate types from a schema either way, and stop debating the thing that stopped mattering two years ago.