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I haven't looked in more detail, but one blocker is that `ProtoMethods() *methods` returns a private type, making it effectively unimplementable outside this package.

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So, I thought this at one point, too. But it turns out that methods is a type alias to an unnamed type, so there's no package level privacy issues: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf-go/blob/v1.26.0/...

Oh huh, interesting, I've never seen that done before.

I'm struggling to understand what the rationale _for_ doing it is though. Maybe it's to avoid an import cycle?

Yes, to avoid an import cycle or polluting the protoreflect API documentation with a rather large non-user-facing API surface.

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