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But something more modern that doesn’t have the encoding/decoding penalty of Protobuf would be better (eg cap’n’proto but there’s a bunch now in this space).

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Not that you are wrong, but in the real world this is not significant for most uses. If it is significant you are doing too much IPC. Or maybe using protobuf where you should be making a direct function call. Fix the architecture either way. (similar to how I can make bubble sort faster with careful machine code optimization, but it is hard to make modern tim sort slower in the real world no matter how bad the implementation is)

Whether it is significant is highly specific to the domain. I think protobuf has accumulated enough problems that every large scale application will eventually run into a footgun or two. Almost all of them have to do with the generated types, not the wire format.

Examples that can noticeably slow things down even for “normal” web apps: map types and deeply nested messages.

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