YAML (and JSON of course) has the big advantage, that you can use JSON Schema to validate it and to provide realtime code intelligence in many Editors (VScode,

YAML (and JSON of course) has the big advantage, that you can use JSON Schema to validate it and to provide realtime code intelligence in many Editors (VScode, IntelliJ, Monaco Editor in the web, many Web IDEs. Allthough you might need a plugin for YAML, where JSON works out of the box). So it's easy to hate on the feature overload of YAML or on the lack of features of JSON, but it's hard to throw out the rich ecosystem along with them they already have established. One format I personally like is JSON5 (https://json5.org/ https://json5.org/) as it's very much just JSON, but with some more modern JavaScript (ES5) syntax allowed, including comments. Looks like a parser / serializer for it is also still rather consise. Although, I'm always wondering which features of YAML to best not use / touch. My personal approach would have been to leave some advanced features to optional pre-processors or real programming / template languages.