Compare that with reading 4 bytes directly into an ieee754 float32.
If your messages are short, the benefits of fast codecs are outweighed by the inefficiencies in the communication system (most of your time, processing power and bandwidth are taken up by setting up and tearing down the communication medium). If it takes 7 "administration" packets to send 1 data packet, your codec won't be your bottleneck (in which case you probably don't care about efficiency anyway, and this discussion is not for you).
You basically restrict networking to big monopolists, like Google, but Google likes binary protocols, like grpc, http2 and quic. And if you have a bug in a complex parser, having text won't help debuggability, because the bug is not in text.
https://code.woboq.org/userspace/glibc/stdio-common/vfscanf-...
Compare that with reading 4 bytes directly into an ieee754 float32.
If your messages are short, the benefits of fast codecs are outweighed by the inefficiencies in the communication system (most of your time, processing power and bandwidth are taken up by setting up and tearing down the communication medium). If it takes 7 "administration" packets to send 1 data packet, your codec won't be your bottleneck (in which case you probably don't care about efficiency anyway, and this discussion is not for you).