Back in the day, XML was almost universally hated by the people you describe as "greybeards", mostly because it was a convoluted "one size fits all" approach, h

Back in the day, XML was almost universally hated by the people you describe as "greybeards", mostly because it was a convoluted "one size fits all" approach, hijacked by business, that ate bandwidth for overhead with none of it's promised benefits actually materializing (because everyone created their own, quasi-proprietary XML Scheme).