I don't have anything to say about Bazel, but the bit about gRPC assumes that the alternatives are as bad.
The closest alternative is Thrift. It's not as popular, alas, but its design is a lot better: you get to combine various encodings (where protobuf mostly has its binary encoding, json, and the underspecified text for configuration); and you get to pick a transport instead of being forced to use http2 with questionable features. You could run Thrift RPC over tcp with basic framing, or over 0mq, or http, or anything else. I'd also argue that Thrift's data representation is better than Protobuf (nesting) but I'll write about it later.
So protobuf is yet another "worse is better" from google: a ton of warts, choices that might make sense for google itself but not for a lot of other situations (http2!), and still winning over superior alternatives :/
The closest alternative is Thrift. It's not as popular, alas, but its design is a lot better: you get to combine various encodings (where protobuf mostly has its binary encoding, json, and the underspecified text for configuration); and you get to pick a transport instead of being forced to use http2 with questionable features. You could run Thrift RPC over tcp with basic framing, or over 0mq, or http, or anything else. I'd also argue that Thrift's data representation is better than Protobuf (nesting) but I'll write about it later.
So protobuf is yet another "worse is better" from google: a ton of warts, choices that might make sense for google itself but not for a lot of other situations (http2!), and still winning over superior alternatives :/