Counterexamples: DNS and it's silly, idiosyncratic compression; FTP and its absolutely batshit control/data channel connections; the ASN.1/BER nightmare of SNMP. Also consider the "simple, plaintext protocols" that should not have been: the r-utils, for instance, had to be supplanted by encrypted binary protocols; NNTP failed, and ultimately ended up centralizing Internet discussion on sites like this, because it was doggedly optimized for text and inevitably abused for binary sharing.
The moral of my story is: those old protocols were bad, practically all of them.
> NNTP failed, and ultimately ended up centralizing Internet discussion on sites like this, because it was doggedly optimized for text and inevitably abused for binary sharing.
That's not really why it failed though, since those binaries are in separate newsgroups that most servers simply don't carry.
The issue is more about spam and lack of moderation, which makes it somewhat unfriendly to newcomers, since one has to do the spam/troll filtering locally.
This over time lead to most newsgroups slowly dying out.
It's 100% of why they failed. NNTP providers that didn't provide full feeds were loudly boycotted. Customers and users left those providers. Ask me how I know! Doing competitive full-feed NNTP was one of the most annoying and least useful things I've worked on.
I have been running a (non-binary) usenet server for quite some time too.. Don't underestimate the annoyance of spam and trolls.
They kill pretty much anything once active moderation disappears.
Once they exceed a certain fraction people tend to get very annoyed and jump ship for anything where they have interact less with them.
Over time only trolls are left in the newsgroup (in many newsgroups they haven't really left to this day).
I consider binary newsgroups and the rest to be two almost unrelated things. Plenty of non-binary usenet servers were doing just fine, but of course no one would really pay for them.
Fair warning: even by my standards, this is an area where I have strong opinions (I loved Usenet, and ran a Freenix-competitive full-feed site in the 1990s). I'll just leave this here:
I'm not saying I can refute what you're saying, just that I think my claim about "binary vs. plaintext" being problematic with respect to NNTP is well-founded.
The moral of my story is: those old protocols were bad, practically all of them.