FYI: required fields were re-introduced in protobuf.
why? because despite what the gobs team and others thinks, that is a necessary feature to work with data structures.
If "everything is optional", what is the value of any structure, over sending an untyped associative array of stuff?
"Optional" fields, as in fields you can tell if they were explicitly set or not, were re-introduced. Depending on your definition either required fields were not reintroduced, or required fields with a mandatory default value were until recently the only kind of field in proto3.
It's possible that was an aim, and I'm not familiar with the timelines here, however this does again focus more on the mechanics of protos which I still don't think matter as much as them being fully integrated into a company like they are at Google. The mechanics of them are still not great. Maybe this was a blocker to that happening though?
Did he miss the point, or was the point to light a fire under the protobuf team to improve their product? Which they eventually did (e.g. required fields were removed after this post was made).