I tend to prefer combining data at the last moment on the client side rather than having it pre-combined on the server side (I prefer REST philosophy over GraphQL). It's probably because I'm web-application focused and so scalability and concurrency is far more important to me than raw execution time. Maybe if I was a data scientist or embedded systems developer, I would care more about execution time. I've met people like that. But IMO performant scripts tend to be the result of more optimizations which makes them harder to maintain as the underlying engines or hardware changes.