Not the parent commenter, but it really gets tough to figure out _where_ you are in a bunch of nested lists, objects, etc deep down in the yml file. When the schema gets complicated enough you start having to refer back to the documentation to understand what syntax a particular item needs (I'm looking at you, docker compose!)

One example from a larger file:

  networks:
    macvlan51:
      driver: macvlan
      driver_opts:
        parent: eth0.51
      ipam:
        config:
          - gateway: 192.168.51.1
            subnet: 192.168.51.0/24

Maybe I'm just getting older and dumber, but that hyphen under config seems completely arbitrary to me (and the necessity of it is poorly documented in the manual). This gets magnified to the extreme as your config file grows. Maybe this is a list of objects under a key? Who knows.

Edit: OK, it looks like hyphens indicate arrays in the schema but for me it feels like a guess as to which one of these to use for each particular case.

Without the hyphen configs value would be an associative array. With it it’s a list.

I’ve been editing long sublime-syntax files recently and I do not like it much. But I’m also not sure if JSON would be better for such a thing.

Whats the point of a list of tuples? Order? Json seems more immediately obvious and consistent in this case ie [{a:b},...]

It's not a list of tuples, it's a list of dictionaries.

Ah, but my confusion just deepens my point, haha.

It's mostly a question of what you're familiar with. JSON using [] and {} to denoting list vs dict isn't fundamentally easier than "-" and a prefix-less list of key:value pairs. YAML has a bunch of extra complexity, but IMHO this difference is really not it.

From a syntax standpoint parenthesis are extremely more clear than prefixes+whitespace (maybe less readable).

Semantic whitespace is a nightmare. It's also sometimes I ambiguous whether things are ints, bools, or strings.