I actually did miss the feeling of being safe in the serialization/deserialization of my data when JSON became widespread, you're right.

These flashback were specifically about WSDL maintenance by hand (it was not very human readable), and how the existence of a schema was used as an excuse to not actually document the meaning of certain fields.

I guess it depends a lot on people, but it seems like most systems need to be robust to idiots to some degree the more widespread they become.