The creator of GraphQL admits this. During his presentation on the library at a Facebook internal conference, an audience member asked him about the difference between GraphQL and SOAP. His response: SOAP requires XML. GraphQL defaults to JSON—though you can use XML.

Conclusion There are decades of history and a broad cast of characters behind the web requests you know and love—as well as the ones that you might have never heard of. Information first traveled across the internet in 1969, followed by a lot of research in the ’70s, then private networks in the ’80s, then public networks in the ’90s. We got CORBA in 1991, followed by SOAP in 1999, followed by REST around 2003. GraphQL reimagined SOAP, but with JSON, around 2015. This all sounds like a history class fact sheet, but it’s valuable context for building our own web apps.

REST is a good architectural style (and it is, a lot of the modern naysaying about REST is relatively uninformed and not too dissimilar to the treatment SOAP had before it)

there was a push for standardisation of “SOAP” (simple object access protocol) APIs

Washing the hair with soap removes less oil from the hair, washing the hair with shampoo removes more oil.