I get the OP is off base with his remark - but at the same time maintained by Google means shit in practice.
AFAIK they have a bunch of production infra on protobuff/gRPC - not so sure about flatbufferrs which came out of the game dev side - that's the difference maker to me - which project is actually rooted in.
Flatbuffers are fine - I think it is used in many places that needs zero-copy. Also outside google, it powers the Arrow format which is the foundation of modern analytics
> but at the same time maintained by Google means shit in practice.
If you worked on Go projects that import Google protobuf / grpc / Kubernetes client libraries you are often reminded of that fact.