Working with XML as a simple data-interchange format is not any more difficult than working with JSON, and it is ubiquitous across all major programming languag

Working with XML as a simple data-interchange format is not any more difficult than working with JSON, and it is ubiquitous across all major programming language ecosystems. Beyond that, you can use powerful tools like namespacing, schemas, XSL, etc if you want them, and they are also ubiquitous across most major programming language ecosystems. They add complexity, but so do their JSON analogues. It seems that people often reinvent aspects of the XML ecosystem using JSON. For example, JSON Schema is like XML schema, OpenAPI is like WSDL, JSONPath is like XPath. That's not to say I don't support these efforts - I think it is great that people are developing powerful tools for JSON. However, I think there is a misconception that the XML ecosystem is less "à la carte" than the JSON ecosystem when it comes to these added complexities. You don't need to deal with them unless you need/want to, and then it is nice to have standardised, battle-tested implementations.