That's ridiculous - there are lots of pragmatic xml deserializers available. Not to mention, sometimes you want something like xpath; lack of xpath and lack of validation (schema, whatever) aren't features, they're bugs.

The only real advantage json has when it comes to deserialization is that it suggests to a human reader that keys are like object properties, leading to a very obvious deserialization strategy. But even that's a bit misleading, since json allows duplicate keys, just like xml, so a pragmatic deserialization library is going to make that feature impossible.

Make no mistake - the culture of straightforward deserialization is hugely valuable! But that's because of its history and other human factors more than the language itself.