Structured editors have been around since the beginning of XML but they have been slow to catch on generally and have never been that popular because people don’t feel in control.

Ah, kinda. Yes, they existed, but they frequently didn't have many of the more standard features like autocomplete (particularly on both sides of a new tag) and on-the-fly structure parsing that makes much of the painful parts easier to work with. I think we take for granted how good our modern approaches to IDE assistance can be.

Ever use the earliest IDE incarnations of Eclipse on a PC still measured in hundreds of Mhz, or when RAM was still in the dozens of MB? That was the world XML found itself in during its inception.

Electric tags in emacs make it mostly not a problem, and most editors have some equivalent: ‘it’ and ‘at’ motions in vim as well as vim-surround and emmet.

But, I agree that this is one of the worst parts of XML

> And with good tools like IntelliJ IDEA

Nah, I have an easier time editing XML in a dumb text editor than YAML with the best tooling I've ever found for it.

In fact, I have an easier time with any of its competitors people post around than with YAML. What is distressing, because the language has clearly the goal of being easy to write.