[coldtea]

>no individual author really needs a language-agnostic way of accessing data beyond compile time.

That's so untrue! People need language-agnostic ways to access data all the time, and people work with data accessing them from multiple languages all the time!

If I have parquet files I can load them in duckdb, in pandas and polars, process them with various independent tools, and loads of other things... and people do that.

This is also why people like something like an SQL database, your data is not locked to some specific language / lib for access.