Unity's serialization system is mainly used for scenes, Prefabs, ScriptableObjects, and various asset types (which tend to derive from ScriptableObject). When one of these object types is saved to disk, it is converted into a text file using the Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) format, which can be deserialized back into the original object type at a later time. All GameObjects and their properties get serialized when a Prefab or scene is serialized, including private and protected fields and all of their components, as well as child GameObjects and their components and so on.
When our application is built, this serialized data is bundled together in large binary data files internally called serialized files in Unity. Reading and deserializing this data from disk at runtime is an incredibly slow process (relatively speaking) and so all...