By the way, WebSockets don't "use HTTP" at all, they just send an initial handshake message that looks very much like an HTTP request. It's a very clever and amazing hack.
Discussion
Is gRPC a good alternative? Don't know much about it but I'm wondering if I should learn.
Alternative to what? I think gRPC is directly tied to protobufs. It is probably good, better than HTTP for proprietary APIs, but I've never used that and I don't want the taste of that Google library bloat in my mouth.