I also find this misleading, and could be solved so easily by just explaining that of course varints need resolving and things will just happen lazily (presumably, I didn’t read the code) when they are requested to be read rather than eagerly.

Is this still true? New versions of protobuf allow codegen of `std::string_view` rather than `const std::string&` (which forces a copy) of `string` and `repeated byte` fields.

https://protobuf.dev/reference/cpp/string-view/