Great work getting this upstream. I'm still getting up to speed on the C++ side of protobuf tooling, but even I felt the protoc compilation pain. Glad to see it fixed.

Aspect Build contributions to the new #Bazel 9 release include prebuilt upstream Protobuf. https://blog.aspect.build/bazel-9-protobuf Protobuf is Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data, making it helpful for high-performance data exchange in systems like microservices and gRPC.