> This is a classic XY problem. The issue isn't the data format, it's the fact that your organizational processes allow random code pushes at 2am that can break the whole thing.

I feel like your comment is a nitpick. Crap getting broken for whatever reason happens. Having human readable things can be helpful for development or fixing things.

Of course, this isn't always the top priority-- other things, like being able to round-trip non-human readable data, or performance, or data density, may win.

This is a classic I don't have a catchy term for it problem, where someone focusses on the details of a given contrived example and thinks the problem and the solution are all solved by addressing the details of that specific contrived example.

The 2am story above is not the problem. Thinking up something that would have avoided that specific story like "have 3 people in shift rotation instead of just yourself, and then you never have a 2am problem", or "don't push code at 2am" is not a solution to the problem.

The value of simple data formats that can be directly read by a human without any special tools, is that it makes the data accessible to reading, analyzing, even processing or modifying, in all of the unknown unknowable infinite possible situations.

You don't know ahead of time that you will one day solve a problem deep in the trenches by being able to read or maybe even modify a file or the stdin in a cgi before some crazy untouchable special app picks it up. You don't know ahead of time that the platform will not have a db client you can use to access the data, but you do know that everything can process text, even an obscure cpu with no gcc or git or any of your usual nice toys, has some sort of shell and some sort of text editor.

You can't touch the main app which is some legacy mainframe banking thing or something, you don't have and can't install or compile anything, but you can still read the data and see that there is some unicode character scattered all through it, and you can set up a dirty hack stream edit to convert it to a single byte ascii replacement, using nothing but plain posix sh or some equivalent no matter what the platform.

And that ugly hack is nine thousand times more useful to the bosses and to yourself than not being able to see what was wrong with the data, and then only being able to say "the other side is sending us bad data, it will be broken until they fix their end, or until we can modify the crazy untouchable thing on our end, because I'm a helpless useless twat"

You can't predict ahead of time exactly when or why or how you will end up wanting to be able to access the data without the normal proper tools or apps from the happy path. But it's a fact that it happens, and having the option is more useful than not having the option. And being the person who can solve a problem is more useful than being the person who can't do anything any other way except the normal expected way.

No one said this trumps all other considerations for all jobs for all data, just that it's very valuable, a consideration among other considerations, and you can't predict all the specific ways in which it is valuable, and so giving it up has to be necessary not thoughtless.