Code readability is one issue, build times another. Chandler Carruth had a nice talk at CppCon 2019 about how widespread usage of protobuf wound up causing the

Code readability is one issue, build times another. Chandler Carruth had a nice talk at CppCon 2019 about how widespread usage of protobuf wound up causing the Compiler to time out on single translation units in the Google code base.