To me, Serde is one of the killer features of Rust. Once you realize how much of programming is (for better or worse) shuttling data between different represent

To me, Serde is one of the killer features of Rust. Once you realize how much of programming is (for better or worse) shuttling data between different representations, it's hard for me to program in a language where I don't have a tool like Serde. A big part of its flexibility is how modular it is. Most common Rust libraries support serde serialization (at least as an optional feature), so if you use crates that do, you can plug any backend in and serialize those data structures to it. It doesn't even have to be string-based; I've been using Serde to store arbitrary data structures as objects on Google Cloud Firestore.