The problem I think is the extreme cargo-culting that exists with any popular technology -- half the arguments against the current flavor of the month really just begin with "no, this is not sent from god, and there do exist tradeoffs". Which is a fairly unreasonable starting point for a conversation between educated parties.
And then the ratchet turns, and the pendelum swings in reverse, and suddenly that thing sent from god was instead discovered to be sent from satan... and you're still trying to explain that tradeoffs exist
I do agree with the XML criticisms around writability and complexity, though I think if you made a Venn diagram of the actual complexities inherent in managing a multi-client document-exchange system and the complexities of XML+Schema, you'd find that they're similar--and that many people who start building such an exchange with JSON documents end up stumbling into the same amount of complexity except in an ad hoc fashion.
It's funny, I wonder if other people have the same surreal experience: as the mass zeitgeist moved away from XML I was more or less like, okay, gotta go with it, as the driftwood goes with the currents. It's interesting how the zeitgeist functions. You can tell it's happening when people look at your functional system and are like, "Uhh, why aren't you using X...?" as though it's self-evident that you should drop everything and rewrite. Where X was, over the years (dating myself) {"Java", "PHP", "Node", "Rails", "Jquery", "REST", "Angular", "React", "Thrift", "NoSQL", "Protobuf", "Hadoop"}. Some of which I quite happily used, BTW, so the interesting part is the penetrative nature of the conversation, e.g. how the quite-functional-but-not-hot technology becomes the sick gazelle falling behind the herd, even as it is not empirically sick.