Canbus is binary isn't it? And Protobuf is very simple.
In any case the problem is that it's easy to write a parser for text data that works for the data you have. It's extremely difficult to write a parser that exactly matches the spec and gets all the quoting/charset/etc. stuff right.
Late reply here but yes, canbus is binary, so is midi. They are both pretty simple. When I say that Protobuf is harder then canbus what I mean is that you have to deal with e.g. variable length integers (“varints”) and key offsets. And yes, that’s very true, full spec parsing is a pain, but that’s also a very rare special case. “In the real world” you usually don’t really care about full compatibility. If someone can find and send your printer data to get it to print securely and your customers can browse and login to your web page and your app, and you can send your Kafka messages to your order service, then everyone is happy, and none of those things require a full spec parser for anything.
In any case the problem is that it's easy to write a parser for text data that works for the data you have. It's extremely difficult to write a parser that exactly matches the spec and gets all the quoting/charset/etc. stuff right.