GraphQL vs REST?

[naive vale]

Hi. I'm creating

1. A simple, minimal portfolio website with <10 products (no-eccommerce).
2. E-commerce website with hundreds of digital file downloads.

These are my first web dev projects and I don't know which data fetching/mutating approach I should be learning?

GraphQL branding is attractive, though is it necessary for these websites? Perhaps the Portfolio websites (a few products) I should be using REST, and GraphQL for the larger website?

Or for the sake of saving time, should I just get familiar with GraphQL and apply that for all projects? Or will GraphQL lead to more complexity/errors and therefore a longer dev time for the simple websites that don't require it?

I assume I should skip the Local API approach as that isn't relevant outside of Payload and GraphQL/REST will be more valuable for my portfolio, if I apply for jobs?

[naive vale]

Or are all of these fetch methods quick and simple to learn and it's much of a muchness which one I use? I see a lot of questions related to GraphQL.

[dreamy sonnet]

honestly the only time i'd reach for GraphQL over REST is when it's needed

we decided to use GraphQL for our own website to have fine-grained control over what data we receive from the CMS, so that we can keep the actual JSON from the CMS which is needed in the page to a minimum

but even there, we probably got negligible benefits over REST and a LOT more complexity

honestly i would go for REST most of the time until you absolutely need graphql

and at that point, you could incrementally move over to GraphQL as needed