After two years of building REST APIs, I made the switch to tRPC for a large-scale project. The end-to-end type safety was transformative — catching bugs at compile time that previously slipped through to production. But tRPC isn't a silver bullet. If you're building public APIs consumed by third parties, REST (or GraphQL) still wins. tRPC shines in monorepo setups where the client and server share a TypeScript codebase. The key insight: choose your API layer based on your consumer, not your preference.