GraphQL Federation Was Built Backwards

GraphQL Federation's bottom-up composition model creates coordination bottlenecks: the consumer-facing supergraph becomes a side effect of what backend teams independently build, rather than a deliberately designed API. The author argues this inverts GraphQL's original consumer-first philosophy. WunderGraph's Fission addresses this by flipping the model — teams start by designing the ideal consumer-facing supergraph (using 'dream queries'), then Fission decomposes it into subgraph responsibilities, automatically propagating entity keys and routing proposals to the right stakeholders. Fission complements rather than replaces Federation: Federation handles runtime query execution, while Fission handles design-time collaboration and schema evolution workflows.