I didn’t, then I’ve started writing GitHub actions and now I do.

Github actions is fine provided you keep the YAML as short as possible and try to call out to a normal script to do everything - i.e. use it as config.

The problem comes when you try to use it as a programming language in and of itself (which MS encourages because it's a route to vendor lock in). It's a shitty, shitty programming language with shitty debugging tools.

To your first point: yes.

To your second point: yes, yes, and very much yes.

Creating complex release workflows within GHA is hell given the debugging situation and that's what we're using because 'it's there, use it, everyone's using it'. Send help

I do. YAML can return to the rotting hole it's from.

Me and anyone who read https://noyaml.com/ .

So a handful of well-known pitfalls and complaints about how it’s easy to represent the same information differently. Yeah, switching to XML definitely solves that problem.

The fact that you know them doesn't make them any better, it just proves you've got Stockholm Syndrome

I get your point but there is exactly no technology you can use without some known pitfalls, so you pick the one whose pitfalls are the least catastrophic or bothersome to you.

I have literally left a 300k+/yr job, twice, due to having to write and maintain too much yaml.

Templating and significant whitespace is the worst. 10 commits in a row of "error on line 1" until helm finally parses what you want.

I am a software developer with extensive distributed systems experience. I like thinking about systems, not guess-and-check on config templates that become a bespoke DSL with no proper way to debug.

Our config structure requires similar but individualized configs for on-prem and the cloud. These can deviate for the region, the data center, the logical cluster, and at the individual node level for A/B or canary reasons. And of course local dev. You need to have a way to know where the deviations are, like different regional hostnames for services you connect with, different node sizes or replica counts, and different labels, any of which may or may not be correct and will cause an incident if wrong.

Search you yaml PRs, and I bet you will find a commit along the lines of "because yaml."