I'm a web front-end engineer, and one day my boss informed the client engineers that the API provided by the back-end would be in the form of gRPC only.
To use the gRPC/Protobuf stack in the web frontend, there were two options: protoc and Protobuf.js. Protoc generated JavaScript code old-schooled and required native dependencies, and Protobuf.js was problematic for us at our scale.
And we are a company that makes mobile apps that use webviews a lot. When webviews communicate with natives, they communicate using the interface defined by the protobuf service schema. The service code generated by the existing protobuf tooling is tightly coupled with gRPC, and it was necessary to make this part into a structure that can be easily replaced.
So we started making our own protobuf compiler, and while building the compiler, we also made a package manager, VSCode extension, and Chrome Devtools.
As far as I know, there is no tool that properly supports functions like Go to Definiton in VSCode extension. We have implemented this function properly, and we plan to implement other functions using our language server such as autocomplete someday.
Now we've stripped out all of the Protobuf.js code, which was a big part of our biggest product, and rewritten it with Pbkit.