In my experience, you don’t need Redux for Firebase either (it’s certainly not required). One of the cool parts of GraphQL on the server side is that you can combine multiple data sources (SQL Databases, Firebase, even REST APIs) into a single queryable endpoint and then your UI doesn’t have to worry about where it gets it’s data from. It’s pretty great.

As for global state, the new React Context API looks promising for that. You can also store local state using GraphQL if you use Apollo Link State. Haven’t tried it myself but it looks cool!