[zemnmez]

I think this kind of gets to the point of what protobuf is, and what a lot of tech is like at Google in general. I spent a lot of my career believing elegance and expressiveness was so important to strive for, even if we as engineers often fall short.

But tech at Google tends to be pragmatic in the specific way that protobuf is. It's not perfect, it doesn't fit neatly into a grand ideology, but it is (at least within Google itself) simple enough, easy enough to understand, portable and fit for purpose. In a similar way to bazel, it's full of components worthy of criticism, but those fixes get made when they become the ecosystem's most pressing issues, and not before.