Thank you so much for taking the time to dig into the compile source code and the thorough comment you left.

For dense JSON: the idea is that it is often a good "default" choice because it offers a good tradeoff across 3 properties: efficiency (where it's between binary and readable JSON), persistability (safe to evolve shema without losing backward compatibility), and readability (it's low for the reasons you mentioned, but it's not as bad as a binary string). I tried to explain this tradeoff in this table: https://skir.build/docs/serialization#serialization-formats

I hear your point about the tagline "like protos but better" which I hesitated to put because it sounds presumptuous. But I am not quite sure what idea you mean to convey by "fresh"?