I don't think it qualifies as bypassing the API design phase. You still need to design the classes that map to GraphQL object, the methods they support, the authentication / authorization that those methods require and so on.

All in all its pretty much the same thing as with a classic API. The only difference is you can send multiple (as well as nested) calls in one go, and decide which fields you want to include With this scheme you can even include/exclude fields based on user authorization! For example:

  class UserService {
    email() {
      if (this.context.user.id == this._id) 
        return this._email
      else
        throw new CodedError(403, "Cannot request another users email")
    }
  }

What is necessary now I think is an example open source app implemented with it to demonstrate how the stuff we do with regular APIs would work in GraphQL...