Isn't protoc mostly the same? I mean I know the code generators are separate binaries (which is quite annoying frankly) but protoc needs to know of them all upstream to expose options like --go_out and --go_opt, right?
The whole situation is extra confusing because some of the core codegen plugins are built into protoc. That's a distribution and version-matching strategy from the Google team rather than a requirement of the plugin system. I'd very much like Google to ship the built-in plugins as standalone binaries, even if they're also bundled with protoc.