Obviously you need certain core pieces of infra that handle protos generically (like serializing and deserializing) but a) total SLOC for that logic is much, m

Obviously you need certain core pieces of infra that handle protos generically (like serializing and deserializing) but a) total SLOC for that logic is much, much less than SLOC for code that works with _specific_ protocol buffers b) "consumers" of protocol buffers as a tool/technology mostly don't worry about what's going on under the hood of the generic serialization, etc. code So it will often make sense to to make that core generic logic even significantly more complicated if it means making the stuff that everyone has to write over and over again even a little bit easier.