Correct, I wasn't critiquing gRPC. I was critiquing a type of person who might push for gRPC. That developer probably thought of it as a novelty and made up reasons to use it. It was a big hassle that added to that teams workload with no upside.
gRPC is fantastic for its use case. Contract first services with built in auth. I can make a call to a service using an API that’s statically typed due to code generation and I don’t have to write it. That said, it’s not for browsers so Mr gRPC dev probably had no experience in browser technologies.
A company I worked for about 10 years ago was heavy gRPC but only as a service bridge that would call the REST handler (if you came in over REST, it would just invoke this handler anyway). Everything was great and dtos (messages) were automatically generated! Downside was the serialization hit.