I think this is another reason why solo developers don't benefit from grpc the way a billion dollar company does: solo developers often aren't using languages that are optimized with grpc (eg they're using python, node, Ruby, sometimes go; they aren't using c++, Java, etc)

Obviously these aren't hard and fast rules, but Google can't just spin up 10x more data centers to run their resource intensive stuff in something other than c++ or Java. They need the efficiency in a way solo developers or small teams usually don't.