That might be what the authors want (the 1.0 spec mentioned configuration, the 1.2 spec mostly mentions data serialization) but in terms of actual use, it's pre

That might be what the authors want (the 1.0 spec mentioned configuration, the 1.2 spec mostly mentions data serialization) but in terms of actual use, it's pretty widely used as a configuration language. There would be no need for optional quote rules, inline hashes/lists or multiple flow styles (all of which YAML supports) if it was purely a serialization language. If you make something human-readable, humans will edit it. The only reliable way to prevent that is to make the serialisation format binary, IMO. YAML also supports a number of really powerful features like you point out (tags, anchors etc.) but I don't see them widely used due to security risks with untrusted input, and interlanguage compatibilty problems. So personally I don't think it's a super good data serialisation language either, despite its power, at least compared to something like Protobuf.