I found that this ends up being a giant amount of useless code, and a ton of memory allocation noise, that only satisfied my desire for elegance. I've given up that approach and just use protobuf types throughout as the base type. I got sick of writing dumb conversion funcs.
It’s fairly mindless boilerplate for sure, but it does mean that when something happens that causes a change like this protobuf update, the change in your codebase is isolated just to the interface between it and your code ie your dumb conversion funcs. Otherwise you end up with the problem the original commenter had.
It’s good to isolate your dependencies within the code :)
