Fanfest roundtable, can’t remember the name of which it was, but answer to my question (paraphrased) “will this new quasar/gRPC stuff replace ESI?” was essentially “yes but we can’t officially say yes”.
No, that roundtable was not recorded as far as I’m aware. If I remember rightly there was some discussion at the time, and it’s also slightly hinted at in the Quasar dev blog, that essentially as game services move onto Quasar/gRPC they can simply flag certain services as ‘public’ and those can then be consumed by non-EVE-desktop-client-clients. AKA third party tools.