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But protobuf isn't grate, especially proto v3 is tuned exactly for googles needs, tools and approaches. But googles needs, tools and approaches are not fitting for most smaller companies.

And gRPC adds a bunch of additional complexity and failure modes, sure it's worth considering especially for larger projects. But a lot of projects get away just fine with a surprising small number of endpoints.

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For the most part, we agree! Protobuf isn't perfect. gRPC is _definitely_ optimized for megacorporation-sized problems.

No matter who you are, though, it's not fun to hand-write boilerplate data types and fetch calls or quibble over which parameters should go in the path and which should be query params. Even when you're actually sending JSON on the wire and using regular HTTP/1.1 POSTs, Protobuf and connect-web make it easy to skip right to the interesting part of your code.

I'm curious how flexible one is if proto3 is given as it is from a schema perspective, where a true schema/constrains language like CUE could be a vehicle to define schemas and then transform that to anything needed, like protobufs or even stubs serializing on the wire.

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