> Even though it’s not meant to be hand-edited, this can impact code readability and maintainability

This kind of implies that the generated code is being checked into a repo.

While that works, it's not the way things are done at Google, where protobuf codegen happens at build time, and generated code is placed in a temporary build/dist directory.

Either way , you shouldn't need to do any maintenance on protobuf generated code, whether you add it to a repo or use it as a temporary build artifact.