For example, regarding Graphcool vs hosted Parse Server on Node, I end up wondering if what cleaner code I have in my mobile clients will be outweighed by messier stack of serverless functions that handle things like push notification and transactional emails etc

@trond hey, thanks for your interest! I'm happy to help you out with your evaluation 🙂 I would encourage you to give the serverless paradigm a try! if you're using something like the Serverless platform, you can combine the control over your code with flexibility and no need to manage your own infrastructure. this blog post might be of interest: https://serverless.com/blog/2017-04-5-build-webshop-with-graphql-and-serverless/

Sweet. Thanks for the link, will have a look