[derefr]

I mean, all the arguments to support my conclusions, are their arguments. If someone spends 10 pages giving you facts and anecdotes and other types of data, and then uses them to support a "dumb" conclusion, they've still done useful work. They don't realize what exactly it is their data proved, but they did do the work required to prove something. Those facts and anecdotes support a conclusion, whether or not they feed it to you at the end/in the abstract.

And, that being said, I think they're right about the conclusion, too. A shorter way to say "Protocol Buffers are a bad choice of common ESB-bus format, even though being an ESB-bus format is the primary thing they're for and what everyone tries to use them for" is "Protocol Buffers are a wrong design." If something doesn't work when used to do the thing it's advertised to do, then it's broken, even if it can do something else.

The only difference between "Protobuffers Are Wrong" and my conclusion is that I'm making the implicit context of their argument explicit. Read between the lines of their argument—they are talking about the use of protocol buffers (specifically, gRPC) in an ESB-bus common-format scenario. None of their arguments make sense if they aren't.