I’ve found it easiest to implement in Node due to the explicit event loop structure. You use data loaders, which is a super generic term that means “batch all requests for this resource into the next event loop tick.”

So when a query requests a list of users, and then every users friends, that becomes two queries: one to load all the users, and one to load all the friends for all those users. The net effect is that your number of queries is O(query depth) rather than O(objects requested).

Admittedly this does tend to work best with more K-V oriented data that truly relational data, and might be hard to retrofit onto a brownfield project, but i’ve never found it all that hard to do.