At a project I worked at we were considering using protobuf for IPC between our desktop app and our network framework code which used different languages.
The performance was part of the reason (compared to serializing using JSON) but the main reason was just tooling support for automatic type checking. gRPC can generate types from a schema for all popular languages out there.
We ended up taking another route but I feel it is important to consider the existing tools ahead of any performance concerns for most cases