I'd vote option 2 as the one that makes the most sense, but not sure how that would work with excerpt(format: RAW) would you need excerpt(format: RAW_FROM_CONTENT)?

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Just ran into this today again... would love a way to only get excerpts if they were actually entered into the field, not falling back to auto generated ones.

Temp solution is to put this in your functions.php file:

/**
 * Give each excerpt node a field of the user defined excerpt, or empty string.
 * SEE https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql/issues/1314
 */
function add_defined_excerpt_field() {
	register_graphql_field(
		'NodeWithExcerpt',
		'definedExcerpt',
		array(
			'type'    => 'String',
			'resolve' => function ( $post ) {
				// phpcs:ignore WordPress.NamingConventions.ValidVariableName.UsedPropertyNotSnakeCase
                $excerpt = '';
                if (has_excerpt()) {
                    $excerpt = wp_strip_all_tags( get_the_excerpt() );
                }
                return $excerpt;
			},
		)
	);
}
add_action( 'graphql_register_types', 'add_defined_excerpt_field' );

Which allows for something like this:

Came here to post exactly this idea and found this existing issue.

I think there should be a way to either disable automatic excerpts, or have a flag so that I can easily decide in code on whether to render the excerpt I got.