I think the parent comment might be asking why using GraphQL instead of REST would result in fetching less data. There's nothing about a REST API specifically that means more data would be sent than with a GraphQL API. Only a poorly designed REST API that sends huge amounts of data unnecessarily would have this issue.
All GraphQL does is move the problem to the frontend, now it's up to a frontend developer, rather than the API developer, to determine how much data is needed. Meanwhile, the API developer also has to ensure that any possible combination of data structure can be efficiently returned from the API rather than preset structures which can be optimised and cached.
With that said, if you're building a data heavy system, where the user of the frontend has lots of interactivity, GraphQL could make requests more efficient by only requesting the data the user has asked for. Data heavy tables and large, interactive charts could certainly see a bandwidth benefit. But with that benefit, you lose the ability to cache responses (meaning you could end up fetching more data overall) and gain an additional performance overhead on the server.
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I think the parent comment might be asking why using GraphQL instead of REST would result in fetching less data. There's nothing about a REST API specifically that means more data would be sent than with a GraphQL API. Only a poorly designed REST API that sends huge amounts of data unnecessarily would have this issue.
All GraphQL does is move the problem to the frontend, now it's up to a frontend developer, rather than the API developer, to determine how much data is needed. Meanwhile, the API developer also has to ensure that any possible combination of data structure can be efficiently returned from the API rather than preset structures which can be optimised and cached.
With that said, if you're building a data heavy system, where the user of the frontend has lots of interactivity, GraphQL could make requests more efficient by only requesting the data the user has asked for. Data heavy tables and large, interactive charts could certainly see a bandwidth benefit. But with that benefit, you lose the ability to cache responses (meaning you could end up fetching more data overall) and gain an additional performance overhead on the server.