The observability tools in question (strace) follow the UNIX tradition of displaying and processing data as text by default. I don’t think that means that they

The observability tools in question (strace) follow the UNIX tradition of displaying and processing data as text by default. I don’t think that means that they suck. I’ll go even stronger than that: IPC and RPC should prefer plaintext-representable forms by default and only abandon them for binary once the real world costs of the textually-representable protocol are found to be unacceptable and unmitigateable. The benefit of being able to use pre-existing introspection tools that were not designed with your protocol in mind—-and use those tools without extensive configuration—-is huge. I think the existence of bad textual formats (e.g. JSON) and the presence of largely-orthogonal-to-binaryness useful affordances in popular binary formats (e.g. schema validation and strong typing in Protobuf) muddies the underlying truth: textual-representability-by-default is rarely costly and often a huge boon to protocol implementors and protocol debuggers.