Both Google and Microsoft have published their API design guidelines, which are very much RESTful. Both companies have applied their guidelines to broader set of products at very large scale. At least, we have not seen alternatives that would be applicable or scalable to companies at Google or Microsoft scale.
API design is like UI design or car design or clothes design. It is a form of craft, which does take time and skills. API design is for customers to have best experience, it was never meant to save time or work for the designers.
Disclosure: contributor of Google API Design Guide.
Many Google APIs were created before this guide. New APIs published at https://github.com/googleapis follow this guide. Having the same API available via both REST and gRPC is very valuable, as gRPC often provides 10x performance.
The proxy is packaged as a docker image, it can run anywhere docker is supported. For performance and convenience, the proxy and the server typically run next to each other, but that is not required.
Have you considered to use a centralized configuration storage (such as S3 and anything else) with access control and audit trail? That is easier to update configs without restarting all the servers.
Agree. If you use any SDK built on top of Application Default Credentials library, it should work automatically and transparently across different environments. The complexity is handled by the library.
If we look at how much technologies have advanced over last decades, the economy produces more than enough output for basic needs, which can be distributed to everyone without much burden.
We can simply offer basic income for everyone, then we can get rid of most special rules, such as food stamps, minimum wage, all kinds of deductibles, flexible spending, childcare. We can tax all incomes at fixed rate and be done with it. All these can be trivially tracked by simple computer system, the only thing needed is identify verification once a year or two.
We would have a much greater society and economy, and avoid the need of "job creation like Walmart".
API design is like UI design or car design or clothes design. It is a form of craft, which does take time and skills. API design is for customers to have best experience, it was never meant to save time or work for the designers.
Disclosure: contributor of Google API Design Guide.