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.