I'm as much opposed to adding more incidental complexity to the frontend as the next guy, but GraphQL has objective purpose and makes a lot of things much simpler

By moving all that complexity to the backend. It's not luddism to call this out.

Learning new things and doing things better than they were done a year before is an essential part of being a professional software engineer

Yeah, no. It's not "better than they were done a year ago". It's just dumping all the complexity in somebody else's lap, reimplements a bunch of things from scratch, poorly, and calls it progress.