The text discusses the benefits of using colocated fragments with Apollo Client's `useFragment` hook to optimize data fetching. Colocated fragments are a technique that decouples parent-child components in terms of declaring and fetching data, while `useFragment` enables direct access to fragment data from the normalized cache. By leveraging these techniques, the author was able to reduce network requests and improve code maintainability, staying true to Apollo's best practice of querying only necessary data where needed. The adoption of this pattern transformed the team's performance and application development, providing a clear separation between accountability and responsibility in data fetching.