Interesting the article jumps straight from REST to GraphQL and forgets Falcor[0] - Netflix's alternative vision for federated services. For a while it looked like it might be a contender to GraphQL but it never really seemed to take off despite being simpler to adopt.
Falcor is actually part of the "old" architecture described in the talk. Because it's mostly unknown and no longer used I didn't go into the details of it.
Falcor was developed at the time Facebook was developing GraphQL in-house. It has similar concepts, but never took off the way GraphQL did.
I was at the React Rally conference where Falcon was publcly announced in August of 2015. I recall that Facebook gave a GraphQL presentation right before.
It seems GraphQL was first announced publicly in February 2015.
[0] https://netflix.github.io/falcor/