That implies that JSON is somehow the gold standard of serialization formats. I don't see it that way. The fact that JSON is ubiquitous in some areas doesn't mean that it's the gold standard for all other uses.

In my experience, protobufs are easy to work with, concise, safe, and efficient. There's never any ambiguity to them, and both creating and parsing messages is fast and easy. That doesn't mean that there aren't cases in which JSONs aren't a better choice, for instance when working with browsers, or needing a text based format for debugging or inspection purposes.

> Protocol buffers are very clever and really cool but using them where you don't need them is a huge waste of effort.

In my experience protobufs require very little effort, with most of the effort being put into defining the schema. It's pretty frictionless afterwards with one notable exception - when you want to manually inspect a message. That's where JSON wins hands down.