Comment by taftster

Right, I find the use of protobuf lacking with direct support in the browser. Since JSON is a native data encoding format of the browser (effectively), it's just easier to have a JSON-based API.

Yes, there are abstractions or other hacks that would bolt on protobuf support in the browser, but that's not ideal in my mind.

Protobuf is an ideal exchange format when you're not dealing with the public as a whole. That is, a private or corporate API for your data processing pipelines, etc.