> Just with those two criteria you’re down to, like, six formats at most, of which Protocol Buffers is the most widely used.

What I dislike the most about blog posts like this is that, although the blogger is very opinionated and critical of many things, the post dates back to 2018, protobuf is still dominant, and apparently during all these years the blogger failed to put together something that they felt was a better way to solve the problem. I mean, it's perfectly fine if they feel strongly about a topic. However, investing so much energy to criticize and even throw personal attacks on whoever contributed to the project feels pointless and an exercise in self promotion at the expense of shit-talking. Either you put something together that you feel implements your vision and rights some wrongs, or don't go out of your day to put down people. Not cool.

JSON exists, and when compressed it is pretty efficient. (not as efficient as protobuff though).

For client facing protocol Protobufs is a nightmare to use. For Machine to Machine services, it is ok-ish, yet personally I still don't like it.

When I was at Spotify we ditched it for client side apis (server to mobile/web), and never looked back. No one liked working with it.