We wanted S2 to be one API. Started out with gRPC, added REST - then realized REST is what is absolutely essential and what most folks care about. gRPC did give us bi-directional streaming for append/read sessions, so we added that as an optional enhancement to the corresponding POST/GET data plane endpoints (the S2S "S2-Session" spec I linked to above). A nice side win is that the stream resource is known from the requested URL rather than having to wait for the first gRPC message.

gRPC ecosystem is also not very uniform despite its popularity, comes with bloat, is a bit of a mess in Python. I'm hoping QUIC enables a viable gRPC alternative to emerge.