XML might be overengeneered (which, except for a few things I don't agree with), but there is currently no alternative for it.
There's perhaps no general alternative to it that covers all of the things XML tries to do; there are lots of specific alternatives that cover specific things that XML tries to do. The complaint against XML isn't that there is a better general replacement so much that there is a better replacement for each (or at least, very many) of the applications and that trying to shoehorn all of them into a single solution has costs that outweigh the benefits.
You can call me clueless or dishonest, I don't care. I can only share my experience with the topic. You don't have to believe me.
It is in fact the de facto standard in the publishing industry. The "other" format is of course PDF.
Maybe all of this will change when we have more technologies that support formats that can handle mixed content as easily as XML.
Most of the times the documents I get are hierarchically structured.
Yes, JSON could be fine as well. But it simply lacks a standard toolchain which XSLT ans its ilk proides.
I am not trying to defend XML in any way. I just want to say the two things:
a) my customers never deal with JSON, but often with XML, so JSON (and other formats) are not an issue for me b) There is a very nice toolchain for XML, including formatters, tranformation tools, database publishing tools (my very own: https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html) and many others. I have not found such a toolchain for other formats.
You are using tools not because they map well to the problem space, but because they are the tools you have, which your customers want, and which you are familiar with, but that does not mean they are actually mapping well to the domain.
