Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure, gave a talk with some very relevant points in this space (The Language of the System): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROor6_NGIWU
The great thing about Clojure is that you can make holistic systems that are end-to-end immutable and value-centric, which means the side effects can go away, which means gRPC stops making sense and we can start building abstractions instead of procedures!
Depending on your use case, you may have to do a lot to work around protocol buffers not being self-describing. I haven't seen a good description of the problem online, but if you find yourself embedding JSON data in protobufs to avoid patching middleware services constantly, you should look at something like Avro or MessagePack or Amazon Ion.