After reading that article my take-away is not that "required" is bad and should never be used ever, but rather it was bad with how Google wanted to use it. And

After reading that article my take-away is not that "required" is bad and should never be used ever, but rather it was bad with how Google wanted to use it. And since this is Google's project, it makes sense for them to remove the feature if it's causing data center outages, it's not worth the risk at that point. For example, in the case of the message bus they say "And even though the message bus doesn’t care about message content", and later on "The right answer is for applications to do validation as-needed in application-level code." Strict schema and validation is most helpful for application developers, not some middleware routing code. Was it not possible for them to write a parser that doesn't fully validate the message for use-cases like this?