Agreed! Had good success doing this with a toy mapping web app. Serializing polylines with Protobufs significantly reduced payload size compared to a JSON `[number,number][]` and as it was HTTP I could offload onto a CDN by setting cache-control headers.
Developer experience is also much nicer. Instead of repeatedly writing JSON serializers/deserializers on the backed + fronted you get them generated for free. I know there's various open API/json schemas code generators but for me i'd rather use Protobuf's at that point and get the benefits of a strongly typed schema, schema evolution, reduced payload size so faster experience for the user, cheaper bandwidth and cheaper storage if you currently store opaque JSON blobs in the db.
Developer experience is also much nicer. Instead of repeatedly writing JSON serializers/deserializers on the backed + fronted you get them generated for free. I know there's various open API/json schemas code generators but for me i'd rather use Protobuf's at that point and get the benefits of a strongly typed schema, schema evolution, reduced payload size so faster experience for the user, cheaper bandwidth and cheaper storage if you currently store opaque JSON blobs in the db.
JSON API's are api's in debug mode.