A better approach

That unfortunately isn't a better approach. The compilation step requires protobuf to be installed, by the distro package manager. To my knowledge it's not available from pypi.

An uncompiled protobuf file is essentially worthless unless it's compiled. But if it's compiled then it's a binary blob.

Not anti-protobuf. Just make the protobuf compiler available without getting a distro package manager involved.

Otherwise slower alternatives might be more viable.

strictyaml bundles strictyaml.ruamel, which used to be an external unmaintained C package.

This reduces strictyaml dependencies to:

pyproject.toml

dependencies = [
    "python-dateutil>=2.6.0"
]

Just that one. So can be confident strictyaml will work.

Can the same be said for protobuf and Google (over invested in AI and is probably dying underneath a huge debt burden while spending tons of money on AI wash propaganda while not funding Python projects enough. Maintainer leave or burn out while everyone is too busy head fcking us with the AI washing to notice.)