> When judging which alternative will succeed, lower perceived human cost beats lower machine cost every time.

Yup this is it. No architect considers using protos unless there is an explicit need for it. And the explicit need is most times using gRPC.

Unless the alternative allows for zero cost startup and debugging by just doing `console.log()`, they won't replace JSON any time soon.

Edit: Just for context, I'm not the author. I found the article interesting and wanted to share.