Wire protocol applies to external interaction with the db.

Internal ABI/API is used by extensions to directly interact with core subsystems and depends on internal models for things like storage.

It might be analogous to HTTP versus an nginx plugin.

curious how hard it is to implement wire protocol compatibility vs the internal api surface. Are we talking like, an order of magnitude more work here? I wonder if, for example, Aurora team are literally maintaining forks of extensions for their implementation and that's why only a subset of all possible extensions are supported?