Comment by liampulles

I know that OpenAPI code gen support is spotty, and that protobuf codegen (in my experience) is quite good, but all of this starts from the idea that the SaaS I'm consuming has actually documented their API properly.

A sizable portion of the integrations I've built have had to be built by hand, because there are inevitable stupid quirks and/or failures I've had to work around. For these usecases, using JSON is preferable, because it is easy for me to see what I have actually been sent, not what the partially up to date spec says I should've been sent.

This is consistent with the idea that communication over the internet should consist of (encrypted and compressed) plain text. It's because human beings are going to have to deal with human reality at the end of the day.