You can get this without gRPC, though. Any IDL with codegen will do. My journey was that of gRPC fanatic to hardened skeptic. After one too many “we’re doing it this way because that’s what Google wants (and thus my promotion needs)” decisions from gRPC “maintainers”, I can’t stomach yielding so much control to a network request framework anymore. There’s something to be said for just making http requests using your platform/language native tooling. Is writing request boilerplate really your dev bottleneck?
Avoiding request boilerplate, in and of itself, is a benefit I could take or leave. Boilerplate request/response code is boring, but not actually time-consuming to write.
What I really like about the IDL and codegen is that it makes inter-team coordination easier. Comments in the .proto file is much nicer for documentation than, e.g., Swagger docs. And it gets even better when you're negotiating protocol changes among teams. You can just start a pull request with the proposed changes to the message format and documentation, which makes the whole process so much easier (and more accurate!) than what I've experienced with negotiating protocol and API changes for REST-style services.
And then, after it gets merged, the rollout is more likely to be successful. With REST, the risk of regression is greater. You've got to contend with ill- and implicitly-defined backward compatibility semantics that are inconsistent among different JSON and request library implementations, and you've got to contend with greater risk of each team's implementation implementing the message serde code in subtly incompatible ways. protobufs and gRPC don't eliminate that risk, but they greatly reduce it.
That said, yes, you're right, it does often feel like gRPC often steps over the line from being sensibly opinionated, to being a way for Google engineers I've never even met to micro-manage me. I wouldn't say I'm a hardened skeptic yet, but I'm definitely no longer a fanatic.
