I think whitespace sensitivity was not the point of the exercise.

But on that topic, I feel whitespace sensitivity is a bad idea even for generic-audience configs. People learn how to use parentheses in primary school. Explicit grouping and nesting isn't black magic.

In general I am sympathetic to whitespace - I find the argument "whitespace insensitivity means the code now contains two conflicting sources of truth: whitespace which the programmer uses, and braces which are the only one that matters because that's what the computer uses" to be compelling.

But the whitespace sensitivity of YAML is particularly bad because of e.g. Helm. Templating a whitespace sensitive language with string interpolation is such a terrible idea.