Many of us would rather use a less terrible programming language instead.
Nonsense. As with anything in software engineering, your goal is to make things as easy that even you can manage them yourself.
If you're failing to comply with this basic principle then blaming tools like YAML has as much weight as blaming any tool at all. If you write code that flies way over your head, you cannot blame the language, text editor, keyboard, choice of keycaps, moon phase, anything. You are responsible for the mess you create for yourself. If your mess is too much for you to handle, the problem is not the markup format you're using.
I recommend you take a moment to look at the most painful pain points you experience in anything you do, and take a long hard look at what you should do to make your own life easier. Blaming YAML or JSON or ASCII does nothing to fix the problems you're creating.
Some people talk about YAML being a turing complete language, if people try to do that in your CI/CD system just fire them
I'll allow helm style templating but that's about it.
I've been using YAML for ages and I never had any issue with it. What do you think is wrong with YAML?