With Protobuf this is a conscious decision to avoid back-compat issues. I'm not sure if I like it.

That's exactly how these systems fail in the marketplace. You make one decision that's good for, say, 50% of cases but disqualifying for 50% of cases and you lose 50% of the market.

Make 5 decisions like that and you lost 31/32 of the market.

Infra teams like it, app devs don't like it.

I’m a dev and I like it.