You don’t need this directive to get YAML 1.2 parsers to parse your document as YAML 1.2; that’s the default. You only need it to instruct YAML 1.1 parsers to

You don’t need this directive to get YAML 1.2 parsers to parse your document as YAML 1.2; that’s the default. You only need it to instruct YAML 1.1 parsers to raise a warning (and I guess for parsers of future version of YAML to fall back to 1.2 behavior, if that ever happens). https://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2781553 https://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2781553 https://yaml.org/spec/1.1/#id895631 https://yaml.org/spec/1.1/#id895631