Sort of. The hand-written go types are the source of truth and the proto definitions are generated from there, solely for the purpose of generating protobuf serializers for the hand-written go types. The proto definition is used more as an intermediate representation than an “API spec”. Still useful, but the ecosystem remains centered on the go types and their associated machinery.

Given that i can just take generated.proto and ingest it in my software then marshal any built-in type and apply it via standard k8s api, why would I even need all the boilerplate crap from apimachinery? Perfectly happy with existing rest-y semantics - full grpc would be going too far