I think the only left out part is about people currently believing in the current hyped way, "because this time it's right!" or whatever they claim. Kind of the way TypeScript people always appear when you say that TypeScript is currently one of those hyped things and will eventually be overshadowed by something else, just like the other languages before it, then soon sure enough, someone will share why TypeScript happen to be different.
>wasting cycles to manifest structured data in an unstructured textual format
JSON IS a structured textual format you dofus. What you're complaining about is that the message defines its own schema.
>has massive overhead on the source and destination sides
The people that care about the overhead use MessagePack or CBOR instead.
I personally hope that I will never have to touch anything based on protobufs in my entire life. Protobuf is a garbage format that fails at the basics. You need the schema one way or another, so why isn't there a way to negotiate the schema at runtime in protobuf? Easily half or more of the questionable design decisions in protobuffers would go away if the client retrieved the schema at runtime. The compiler based workflow in Protobuf doesn't buy you a significant amount of performance in the average JS or JVM based webserver since you're copying from a JS object or POJO to a native protobuf message anyway. It's inviting an absurd amount of pain for essentially zero to no benefits. What I'm seeing here is a motte-bailey justification for making the world a worse place. The motte being the argument that text based formats are computationally wasteful, which is easily defended. The bailey being the implicit argument that hard coding the schema the way protobuf does is the only way to implement a binary format.
Note that I'm not arguing particularly in favor of MessagePack here or even against protobuf as it exists on the wire. If anything, I'm arguing the opposite. You could have the benefits of JSON and protobuf in one. A solution so good that it makes everything else obsolete.
Please avoid snark.