Whilst gRPC is nearly always used together with protobuf, I think it’s important to note they are different projects.
gRPC is a CNCF project with open governance. gRPC people show up at industry conferences like KubeCon and run their own conference.
Protobuf is a Google-internal project, with opaque governance and no conference.
I find it striking that the one has such tight dependencies on the other. Indeed the article is mostly about protobuf.
gRPC actually doesn't care that much about the serialization method. It's straightforward to use JSON, MsgPack, BSON, CapnProto, and so on with gRPC instead of protobuf.
Protobuf is a Google-internal project, with opaque governance and no conference.
I find it striking that the one has such tight dependencies on the other. Indeed the article is mostly about protobuf.