GraphQL specifies schema and documentation, and implementations usually come with introspection tools, which is not the case for REST. It would be more fair to compare GraphQL to something like Swagger.

That said, GraphQL libraries and tooling tend to be less fragmented and more ready to use than for equivalent REST stacks, which makes development much easier. A simple API built in Python with Graphene looks terse and declarative, while doing the same with Django REST Framework requires adding pages of plumbing code to build an equivalent REST API.

Re: GraphQL being a pain for a backend development - I don't quite understand that argument. If you want to keep a tighter control over the schema, you can have it - the API schema does not need to be a reflection of the underlying data schema with all its relationships - it should be the front-end developer's job to convince you that this or that complex relationship needs to be exposed via GraphQL and let you make sure that it's served efficiently.