I don't think the Java section makes sense either. I'm no historian, but I don't think it was ease of serialisation that led to huge amounts of config in Java. I suspect that was more to do with its status as an "enterprise" language.

Having encountered a similar proliferation of config in "enterprise" C++ (where it's usually not implemented in terms of serialisation) it was mostly driven by a need to modify the behaviour of systems in production without having to go through software release processes that were often cumbersome and beaurocratic.