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