Ah yes, this is definitely a challenge. At my day job we use protobuf and follow the (imo well documented and well evangelized) best practice of forbidding breaking changes to protos, so I almost forgot about this class of problem. At least for changes to structure. Changes to semantics can still happen but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone cause a major issue while keeping structures compatible.

We have escape hatches, which I mainly use when deleting code.