Has comments, unlike JSON.

More difficult to mess up than YAML.

But as complex as YAML to understand

There's probably a name for this kind of fallacy that exaggerate the effect of a problem and the resulting contortions that were engineered around it.

I look at this and I see a visually-well-organized hierarchy of objects with properties and children. It's a sideways tree diagram. I honestly don't get what's supposed to be unappealing about it.

> Can you name any language any more unreadable than XML to help me?

Most of the other markup languages depending on the usecase. The "redundant" tags everywhere like </Address> in XML are very helpful if you're in the weeds of a big document that's taller than your viewport - you still know exactly what you're looking at and where in the hierarchy you are, as opposed to JSON or YAML which I find much easier to get lost in.

Anyone can pick up a (properly-named) XML document and tell what it means at a glance, but JSON is easily a mystery unless you know the implicit schema beforehand.

Maybe there's some minor friction to get past looking at XML because it's a little visually busy before you learn how to parse it out? Is that all there is to it?

But I have worked with some very complex XML and I feel you’ve chosen a simpler to read example.

I have seen very complicated XML from Microsoft’s own configurations that is so large, long, and complicated that it is very hard to follow