I manage a team of business analysts and accountants who use XSLT for generating reports for banks, XSLT is usually their first experience programming outside some linkedin learning courses. Not once has one of them ever complained about namespaces, or verbosity or anything like it, this is something I only see on HN or the programming subreddits.

The vast vast majority of Devs only experience of XML is what they hear second hand, I'm sure a lot more would like it if they tried it.