I'm not sure what your definition of smart polling is but there is no polling going on here - the query only reruns when the data dependencies change server-side due to a subsequent mutation.
Another key distinction is that "query" here doesn't refer to a database read, it could be a complex function containing multiple reads, relatively-arbitrary compute, etc.
Another key distinction is that "query" here doesn't refer to a database read, it could be a complex function containing multiple reads, relatively-arbitrary compute, etc.