Right. My hypothesis here is that, if there were, instead of JSON and YAML to choose from, three standards, one of which were something slightly less human-friendly but much simpler than YAML, I think it would be widely adopted.

I think YAML is more widely-used than it would otherwise be, in a broader variety of domains, simply because the only popular alternative doesn't have comments.

I'm not drawing from this any sort of conclusion that we should try to push one of these alternatives as viable, just lamenting the state of things.