Exactly! Serde is good enough that few people look for alternative ways of doing things (i.e. zerocopy), and the network effect incentivizes just integrating wi

Exactly! Serde is good enough that few people look for alternative ways of doing things (i.e. zerocopy), and the network effect incentivizes just integrating with it, to be compatible with all the other crates. At the same time (but orthogonal to the previous point) it serves as one of the first contact points and prime example of how to do metaprogramming in rust for new people (syn/quote and derive proc macros). This combination of being one of the first things you touch, it's age, and the fact that quote/syn IS a lot better API than what proc macros natively expose, has is in my opinion a lot of influence over (old and new) rust developer metaprogramming mindshare, and pushes the language down a specific garden path/design space. (What I'm trying to champion here is that this should be done more deliberately, much like jQuery eventually caused the cration of new querySelector web APIs.)