That's not Google. Buf.build is, hilariously enough, a completely separate company that tries to make sense of Google's protobuf, and it's doing a decent job from what I can see.

so you're saying protobuf has no purpose?

i mean...

Protobuf should at least get credit for enforcing fields be optional.

They reluctantly acknowledged that as a mistake by adding an actual "optional" modifier for field presence. proto3's previously so-called optional were really all present with a zero default value; proto2 could have supported that for required fields at the code level if they had wanted. In the end, all they've changed is how they frame the feature.