Important to note, however, that spoken language information density (per syllable) and syllabic rate are strongly inversely correlated [1]; languages such as Mandarin with lots of information contained in each syllable tend to be spoken slower than languages like Spanish, which uses many more syllables to convey the same amount of information, but in a similar amount of time.
So, the compactness really is more just on the writing side.
It's not the DIV-soup that is an accessibility problem (though that's what often takes the blame), it's the lack of adding accessibility attributes (`aria-*, tabindex, title`, etc.). Lots of builtins, especially form elements, give you many accessibility traits "for free", but there are a wide variety of ways to tag a bowl of DIV soup for accessibility.
Then there's "semantic HTML(5)" (`<article>, <section>`, etc.), which still exists, but is not _particularly_ worthwhile for accessibility: Too much of the web lacks these tags, so most common consumers of this nature (scrapers, screen readers, content summarizers) use other, often AI-based, strategies to tag content semantics.
After working with Apollo for a couple weeks on a non-trivial side project, I'm particularly happy with how unopinionated the library is. While it's super hip to complain about JS fatigue these days, Relay just wanted to make too many decisions. In that sense, it's a pro and a con: Relay will make more decisions for you, but will present difficulty if you've already made some of those decisions yourself.
Apollo's using Redux is great. The model and API are well understood so it's easy to bring developers on board. Relay seems to follow the same principles, but does them in its own way.
Relay is also opinionated about your server's responses. I know that the cursor pattern with edges and nodes is great for performant pagination, but then our schema has to conform to that spec and I really don't enjoy spending time explaining why we can't just get that user's photos, we have to get that user's photos' edges' nodes. Graph theory has a place, but it's not that close to the frontend, IMO.
More than anything, it seemed very easy to get up and running with Apollo. After reading lots of Relay docs, it still took a lot of experimentation and effort to get this running to begin with. I am very happy with Apollo's docs.
So, the compactness really is more just on the writing side.
[1] "A cross-language perspective on speech information rate" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/16e6/43a9e39674c58acd7cdf56...