Serialized protocol buffers can be converted to the human friendly text format: https://protobuf.dev/reference/protobuf/textformat-spec/ https://protobuf.dev/r

Serialized protocol buffers can be converted to the human friendly text format: https://protobuf.dev/reference/protobuf/textformat-spec/ https://protobuf.dev/reference/protobuf/textformat-spec/ He most likely wants to have the type structure generated by protocol buffer as opposed to parsing JSON The latter requires asserting in a million places that this key exists in this map with this type, which will require a million lines of crap code. Not to mention packing and unpacking the serialized data and maintaining two separate sets of corresponding structures/records that have to be kept in sync.