It feels like maybe there us an excessive focus on the RPC in gRPC. You operate upon services, not objects like many traditional RPC systems (RMI, for example).

Do people really use gRPC in a stateful way? Wasn't one of the issues with old schools RPC that you pretended RPC objects were local objects? Here you do the opposite, aknowledge that objects are remote and you only have a copy of it locally.