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This a million times. gRPC / Protobuf allow you to neatly design your messages in a backwards and forewards compatible way. This helps you make changes to your service after your application has been deployed. Why on earth would you try to reinvent something like that?

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Indeed why. Yet we have near-countless 'standardised' ways of marshalling parameters - this is just the one that has the best marketing.

Driving the highest traffic sites in the world, and the backend systems that power them for 2 decades, is just marketing? Weird.

Which company does this? While my workplace has used many of these components individually I can't think of a single team that actually uses gRPC off-the-cuff. Nor can I think of anyone that's even mentioned migrating to it.

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

Well, I'll concede the point, but mass adoption doesn't imply idealness.