GraphQL aliases not possible due to dgraph internal graphql+-

Users GraphQL
2

Also, the @cascade solution seems to fall off when used in combination with the first filtering both in GraphQL and GraphQL± (the first directive is applied before the cascade, so if the first element fetched do not satisfy the cascade, the query returns an empty result)

You can get the first n element after cascade using the query variables. You first store the UIDs of nodes which are not filtered out by the cascade directive and then select first n from them. Here is an example of GraphQL± query doing it.

{
  u as var(func:has(name)) @cascade
  {
      name
      friend @filter(eq(name, "ashish") {
         name
         age
      }
  }
  
  another(func: uid(u), first:10)
  {
      name
  }
}

you can refer to first-n-returns-not-all-the-items