Most jobs especially in webdev are like that. Most of it is just reheated slop, if the market was efficient the webdev market would shrink by 75%. I've done novel stuff but most of my jobs end up just pushing a star shape through a square and a triangle whilst making sure the whole legacy spaceship keeps floating.
There are truely novel webdev jobs out there, but they are a needle in a haystack. If you want something that mentally stimulates you as an developer find a job that doesnt involve web for higher chance of finding something that fits the bill.
This is actually pretty hard to do. We all have heard of internet rot/dead internet theory.
One shout might be to link to internet archive instead of the resource directly. Though we can't be sure internet archive will keep the current system working as is (e.g. search params may change etc)
The only solid solution I have is to set up a foundation and pour money in so that they will be responsible for upkeep. But that would be an hassle to execute.
100 years in internet time is very long, internet as we know it now hasn't been along for 100 years.
I wonder if there aren't services that specialize in this.
GraphQL is good at complex specificity. Leaving it to the caller how it wants its data structured in the return.
The struggle with it is more on the provider side. As you'd have horrible performance if you'd just rawdog an ORM onto it. The complexity of combining is where you'll struggle.
Last I played with GraphQL was with PHP. There is exactly one package that did GraphQL at that time. Where we had to define the models both in yaml and php.
Though this could probably be solved with dynamic building of the yaml.
Also last I checked the testing utils werent there yet.
Though it is really cool to be able to do supergraphs if you decide to do microservices.
Alternatives are json and protobuf. GraphQL kind of lands between big json blobs and protobuf's binary in size. Due to it's possible exactness. But that is wholly dependant on implementation.