This was hard for read because of the glaring omissions of existing engineering practices. It feels author only cares about programming purity and writing prog

This was hard for read because of the glaring omissions of existing engineering practices. It feels author only cares about programming purity and writing programs which transform metadata. Making all fields in a message required makes messages into product types but loses compatibility with older or newer versions of protocol. Auto-creating objects on read dramatically increases chances that a field removal in future version of protocol will be handled properly. Auto-creating on write simplifies writing complex setters, etc... You could argue that those problems could be solved better (and I might agree, protobufs are one of my least favorite serialization protocols) but not even acknowledging reasons and pretending the designers didn't know better makes writer seem either ignorant or arguing in bad faith.