Is your feature request related to a problem?

In #2254 @fuziontech introduced protobuf for the clickhouse_events topic. Exact motivation if unknown by me, but I assume it has to do with cost savings around kafka traffic.

We never rolled out the feature to other topics and since then we've:

• Introduced plugin-server
• Introduced new topics that facilitate events service <-> plugin server communication (including for communicating events data)
• Introduced dead letter queue and other topics
• Are considering significantly changing the events table structure, which in turn requires updating the existing protobuf schema and test deploying these changes. This in turn might create potential posthog upgrade barriers.
• Are considering supporting external clickhouse cloud providers (like altinity) which might not have support for using custom format schemas
  • Might require hacks like Allow disabling protobuf with CLICKHOUSE_DISABLE_EXTERNAL_SCHEMAS env #8333 to land to support them well.

All of this makes the protobuf solution we have right now less than ideal. It also doesn't really serve the potential cost-saving purpose as events are json-encoded in at least one topic already.

The discussion point here is - what shall we do about it?

Do we want to invest more and get protobuf on other topics? Do we want to make it entirely optional/configurable? Do we want to drop it completely?

cc @fuziontech @hazzadous @guidoiaquinti @tiina303 @yakkomajuri @marcushyett-ph for team-platform context

cc @EDsCODE and @timgl who might have additional context

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