What Changed? GraphQL was supposed to be the future. Back in 2023, choosing it felt like the natural evolution. But something's shifted. In 2026, offshore development teams are quietly pivoting back to REST APIs for their new work. Some shops are even layering REST on top of their existing GraphQL systems. This isn't a story about GraphQL being broken. Rather, it's about how offshore delivery teams operate. When you're coordinating developers spread across time zones and working with multiple vendors, some technical choices become significantly more expensive than others. Performance Takes a Hit GraphQL solved real problems. The theory around eliminating over-fetching and under-fetching made sense on paper. But offshore teams are discovering different bottlenecks entirely. N+1 query problems are the big culprit. They look harmless during local testing. Add some geographic distance though, and they turn into a nightmare.…