Google loves to reinvent shit because they didn't understand it. And to get promo. In this case, ASN.1. And protobufs are so inefficient that they drive up latency and datacenter costs, so they were a step backwards. Good job, Sanjay.
By all means, keep using it, but it might be worth figuring out why other people don’t. Hint: it’s not because they’re more stupid than you or are looking to get promoted by big G.
(Personally, I like the ideas and binary encoding behind Capn Proto more than all the alternatives)
For high performance and critical stuff, SBE is much more suitable, but it doesn't have as good of a schema evolution story as protobuf.