When scaling to 100,000 daily active users, API payload size isn't a trivial optimization—it's a $12,400/month cost driver for mid-sized teams, with 68% of latency spikes tied to over-fetching and unnecessary serialization. We tested GraphQL 17, vanilla REST, and tRPC 11 under identical load to find the real winner for high-scale Node.js apps. 🔴 Live Ecosystem Stats ⭐ graphql/graphql-js — 20,313 stars, 2,047 forks 📦 graphql — 146,665,044 downloads last month ⭐ trpc/trpc — 40,126 stars, 1,595 forks 📦 @trpc/server — 12,803,180 downloads last month Data pulled live from GitHub and npm. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now Soft launch of open-source code platform for government (262 points) Ghostty is leaving GitHub (2872 points) HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work' (166 points) He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times.…