Fetching content via GraphQL from Drupal 8 took a very long time here, especially on pages with many images (that were resized via thumbor).
I wondered if GraphQL's entityRendered property does not cache page content - especially since we're using the "graphql" drupal user, and caching in Drupal 7 was non-existent for logged-in users.
It turns out that Drupal 8 has a dynamic page cache[1] which is able to do caching for logged in users.
The culprit were my settings in docroot/sites/base/development.services.yml:
parameters: graphql.config: development: true
That disabled the cache.
[1] https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/core/modules/dynamic-page-cache/overview