This is not about YAML in some general or abstract sense, it is about a YAML-based domain-specific language. If you think this is just about YAML, you are hyper

This is not about YAML in some general or abstract sense, it is about a YAML-based domain-specific language. If you think this is just about YAML, you are hyper-focused on the wrong detail. In order to use this domain-specific language properly, you first must learn it, and learning YAML is but a small part of that. Moreover, it is not immediately obvious that, once you know it, you actually want to avoid it. But you can't avoid it entirely, because it is the core language of the CI/CD platform. And you can't know how to avoid it effectively until you have spent some time just using it directly. Simplicity comes from tearing away what is unnecessary, but to discern necessary from unnecessary requires judgment gained by experience. There is no world in which this knowledge transfers immediately, frictionlessly, and losslessly. Furthermore, there is a lot that GitHub (replace with platform of choice) could have done to make this better. They largely have no incentive to do so, because platform lock-in isn't a bad thing to the platform owner, and it's a nontrivial amount of work on their part, just as it is a nontrivial amount of work on your part to learn and use their platform in a way that doesn't lock you into it.