I hear your point and it's true that you can't point the finger at GraphQL qua GraphQL, but that's sort of by definition since gql in itself is, as you say, just a spec. But, and I'm not saying this is the case, if every implementation of gql has major issues, it's not really fair to say "but but the spec itself is fine". As programmers, we aren't working with the spec.
It's technically possible to achieve the result op wants in sub millisecond time. However I'm not sure if Node.JS is the right stack for this. You'll have to carefully avoid object creation and reduce garbage collection overhead.
