The text discusses the evolution of GraphQL at scale, from its initial adoption by organizations looking for a way to simplify frontend development in microservice architectures. As more teams adopt GraphQL, they face challenges such as duplicated effort and complexity, leading to either monolithic implementations or the backend-for-frontend (BFF) pattern. The BFF approach can be effective but also introduces duplication of infrastructure costs and increases attack vectors. To address these issues, schema stitching is proposed, which allows splitting a monolithic GraphQL schema into multiple underlying services. However, this approach is complex, fragile, and prone to errors. In contrast, Apollo Federation offers a solution by separating the schema into concerns, allowing multiple federated services to extend a single type with the gateway composing the type fragments together. This approach enables a more scalable and maintainable way of handling GraphQL at scale, but also introduces new distributed system challenges.