Uh, no. If anything, they are switching more workloads to Flatbuffers. Google does a lot of fleet-wide profiling and the encoding and decoding of protocol buffe

Uh, no. If anything, they are switching more workloads to Flatbuffers. Google does a lot of fleet-wide profiling and the encoding and decoding of protocol buffers, which were meant to be efficient, is NOT lost in the noise. Groups like the toolchain teams have a good idea of how many orders of magnitudes in cores are spent doing just that every second. Something like JSON would require probably tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in additional machines for no gain (slightly educated, but still wild guess).