The crappy system that everyone ends up using is better than the perfectly designed system that's only seen in academic papers. Javascript is the poster-child of Worse is Better. Protobuffs are a PITA, but they are widely used and getting new adoption in industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

I worked at a company that had their own homegrown Protobuf alternative which would add friction to life constantly. Especially if you had the audacity to build anything that wasn't meant to live in the company monorepo (your Python script is now a Docker image that takes 30 minutes to build).

One day I got annoyed enough to dig for the original proposal and like 99.9% of initiatives like this, it was predicated on:

- building a list of existing solutions

- building an overly exhaustive list, of every facet of the problem to be solved

- declare that no existing solution hits every point on your inflated list

- "we must build it ourselves."

It's such a tired playbook, but it works so often unfortunately.

The person who architects and sells it gets points for "impact", then eventually moves onto the next company.

In the meantime the problem being solved evolves and grows (as products and businesses tend to), the homegrown solution no longer solves anything perfectly, and everyone is still stuck dragging along said solution, seemingly forever.

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Usually eventually someone will get tired enough of the homegrown solution and rightfully question why they're dragging it along, and if you're lucky it gets replaced with something sane.

If you're unlucky that person also uses it as justification to build a new in-house solution (we're built the old one after all), and you replay the loop.

In the case of serialization though, that's not always doable. This company was storing petabytes (if not exabytes) of data in the format for example.