RDF is not dependent on XML. There is a XML representation of RDF, but alternatives include JSON (using JSON-LD) and simple textual formats such as N3 and Turtle.

One trouble w/ RDF is that there are two official ways to do ordered collections, the RDF list which is basically a LISP list, and then RDF collections where the order is encoded in predicates. Neither is well-supported in most tools, for instance SPARQL lacks the list handling capabilities that you'd see in

https://docs.arangodb.com/3.12/aql/

or

https://www.couchbase.com/products/n1ql/

The XMP spec, for instance, hacks Dublin Core by adding ordering information because... It matters what order the authors are in. Dublin Core on the other hand seems to be developed for cataloging elementary school libraries and they were huge fans of doing the easy stuff and leaving out anything moderately hard, so Dublin Core looks like it has a 1968 level of sophistication and MARC is so much more 2000s. People come to RDF, see all these problems that are ignored, and come to the conclusion RDF is not for them.

There is a good repo that collects many of the issues with RDF[0], which I would have loved to have known about earlier in my journey with RDF.

[0]: https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF

While there are (commonly used) alternative serialization formats, RDF is married to XML data model, as all core datatypes of RDF are defined in terms of XSD (XML Schema Definition) datatypes and very closely mimics it's data model.

If you want to have an RDF that is independent of that (e.g. based on Apache Arrow so that it's compatible with modern big data tooling) you might as well start from scratch.