Context:
I'm using Spring Boot and as metrics implementation for actuator micrometer-registry-prometheus which then uses prometheus-metrics-exposition-formats

While inspecting our final built jar I noticed that your dependency is shipped with protobuf which is rather big (when compared to the rest):

I'm also not actively using protobuf and therefore it would be great if this could somehow be excluded.

It's also noted in the docs that protobuf is somewhat obsolete/experimental so shipping this by default is maybe not needed in the first place.