If database capacity is your main concern and not independent schema deployability, then federation is overkill. You can just connect to whichever databases contain your data in your resolvers within a single service.
You have to be at pretty massive scale before federation becomes necessary and by then (if ever) your frontend teams have experienced benefits that are pretty much miraculous. The reason frontend wants to fit as much as possible into it is because it's vastly better than what came before it unless you have a 95th percentile org that is really doing an outstanding job managing the API via other means.
You have to be at pretty massive scale before federation becomes necessary and by then (if ever) your frontend teams have experienced benefits that are pretty much miraculous. The reason frontend wants to fit as much as possible into it is because it's vastly better than what came before it unless you have a 95th percentile org that is really doing an outstanding job managing the API via other means.