I remember the XML is everywhere phase. The community that hasn't retired or passed on has largely come off of that. You can return JSON natively from XSLT 3.0 now. I've been on both sides of the love/hate fence with XML, but these days when I have the need to work with it I leave the projects really satisfied.
The best part of the XML craze was the deprecation of proprietary binary file formats. I had to work with some software that was truly awful but since it saved it's data as XML,I could skip the software entirely and work directly with the data.
