The fundamental premise of the relational model is the physical/logical distinction. The relational model deliberately does not make any requirements or assumptions about how data is physically stored or structured.
The difference between relational and graph (and other NoSQL database systems) is not about particular sizes and shapes of data, it is about level of abstraction. For example assuming joins are "log(n)" makes certain assumptions about how relations and indexes are implemented which is only true for some naive implementation (like Access or MySQL).
Just as an example, materialized views is a physical-level optimization where an arbitrary complex query result is stored and kept updated, which means data can be retrieved as fast as physically possible. Of course this has a cost at insert-time, since materialized views also have to be updated - but this is a performance trade-off just like the structure of a graph database is a performance trade-off.
NoSQL databases has a tight coupling between the physical and logical structure, which makes them easier to optimize towards particular usage patterns but harder to adapt to changing requirements over time. The relational model was specifically designed for large databases used by multiple applications and changing over time.
The difference between relational and graph (and other NoSQL database systems) is not about particular sizes and shapes of data, it is about level of abstraction. For example assuming joins are "log(n)" makes certain assumptions about how relations and indexes are implemented which is only true for some naive implementation (like Access or MySQL).
Just as an example, materialized views is a physical-level optimization where an arbitrary complex query result is stored and kept updated, which means data can be retrieved as fast as physically possible. Of course this has a cost at insert-time, since materialized views also have to be updated - but this is a performance trade-off just like the structure of a graph database is a performance trade-off.
NoSQL databases has a tight coupling between the physical and logical structure, which makes them easier to optimize towards particular usage patterns but harder to adapt to changing requirements over time. The relational model was specifically designed for large databases used by multiple applications and changing over time.