YAML is fine for human-maintained configuration. Yeah it has its footguns (like Norway) but if you're actually writing human-maintained configuration then you q

YAML is fine for human-maintained configuration. Yeah it has its footguns (like Norway) but if you're actually writing human-maintained configuration then you quickly pick these up with practice and they turn into a non-issue. If your configuration is complicated enough that it needs to be generated, then use a real general-purpose language to generate it. Not crummy pseudo-imperative constructs bolted onto the YAML. At the very least, systems that take YAML as configuration should also take JSON as configuration. GitOps-style systems should allow you to define, not just system.yaml config, not just system.json config, but also system.js config, that is evaluated in some kind of heavily-restricted sandbox.