> I even pointed out a real-world concrete example where JSON config is made pleasant to edit by hand for humans: an IDE like VS Code that pulls in JSON schema.

I think the debate here is what "editable by humans" means. If you're using a tool for editing JSON like VS Code, I don't believe you're really editing it by hand. You're using a program that has specific things for JSON that give you to have a pleasant experience editing. I believe editing by hand means using a standard plain text editor and it's a lot worse.

Formats that use braces are relatively easy to parse by machines but can be harder to read by humans. Utilizing white space makes things easier for humans to read. A JSON file could have everything on one line. But something like YAML it forces you to use white space and new lines which helps humans to read it.

I would 100% rather edit JSON (in vanilla vim) than ever touch YAML again in any editor I've used. It has weird rules for what whitespace is significant and what indent level I need for things, versus JSON where % will match quotes and parents and braces quite easily.

The only significant thing missing from JSON is comments. JSON5 or convention can solve that, so it's not as bad as you'd expect.

I'm sorry man, but it really doesn't. In over ten years of using yaml I haven't seen a single instance where the whitespace rules were in any way weird or counter intuitive.

Most programming languages don't have significant whitespace, but it doesn't prevent people from writing readable code in them. And I haven't ever seen anybody write a long JSON config any differently - it's indented etc, for the same reason why C code is indented.

Still, editing JSON directly by an IDE that still exposes its syntax is "editing by hand", just as editing C in Vim with ctags is still editing by hand.

I do have to note though that VSCode uses JSON with extensions. Most obviously, it allows comments. But there are other minor things that make it easier to write (and parse) - e.g. it allows trailing commas in literals.

> And I haven't ever seen anybody write a long JSON config any differently

It's not people to have to worry about. It's the machine generated code. But now that I think about it more, YAML is a bad example since it's a superset of JSON. So a machine could generate really ugly YAML too.

Operating under the assumption that config files will be handled by a plain text editor and not an IDE seems unreasonable.

I've edited the VSCode config in JSON form by hand when adding snippets and overriding how the vim plugin handles some keys. Instead of the normal settings view, it was just the JSON in the text editing view.