I haven't looked at Apollo, but GP should've explained that GraphQL is not a database and can be hooked up to any backend, so with it I'm guessing you can use any kind of database in Apollo/Meteor apps. Still, kind of weird.
I remember when Meteor was the JavaScript flavour-of-the-month and everyone was saying it will kill Rails. I wanted to believe so I looked into Meteor, then I saw its dependence on MongoDB... Nope!
If you study the backend JavaScript ecosystem you'll see no Rails-like all-in-one framework has ever succeeded. They're just not part of the culture. The only Rails-like thing in the JS ecosystem that's popular and great is Ember but that's only frontend.