I was actually imagining skipping the Object step; if you go from wire -> buffer, and only ever work on it in buffer form (i.e. in WebAssembly, in a language more amenable to working on buffers/bytes), you skip needing the Object -> JSON step. Notwithstanding whatever you need to do in the wire -> buffer step.
Working with bytes in JS is still gross and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Like I said, if you had a way to automate it, it wouldn’t be so bad.