XML is less precise, because it's more flexible. Powerful and mature tooling only matters to people creating and editing XML, not computers. XML Schemas are there to support human editors, not computers. Verboseness means larger files and longer processing times, which does matter to computers; the verbosity is explicitly and only there for human readers and editors. JSON is a much better format for something humans only occasionally look at.

My experience has been similar to the immediate parent although I think xml looks better than json here. All fun and games till you forget to turn transforms and the 10 other knobs in your parser off.

The dev will be like "okay what are transforms though?" as they watch new calculator.exe instances popping up on the screen.

> It also benefits from much more powerful and mature tooling.

JSON is over two decades old. XML is only five years older. Both have powerful and mature tooling; I'm not sure how you can suggest otherwise.