Yes. As a tree structure, basic xml is fine. There are lots of other ways to do it, but there's really not much difference. For communication, agreement on a common language is more important than its intrinsic merits. (and xml partly attained that because it looks like html, which was still new at the time).

But the xml ecosystem is horrible. Sensible ideas, horrific execution; like namespaces and schema. Probably the single worst problem was using xml syntax itself: it's like, a programming language that uses JSON for its syntax.

But also, there's guilt-by-association, people hate the enterprise culture that uses xml - similar happened to java.

Though xpath is not so bad, and many people seem to quite like it.

Finally... json is a better match for data, basically by being c-like. However, an ecosystem tumour is also growing, around JSON. Some even use json syntax itself...

I wonder, if perhaps, a root issue is that the world is complex, and youthful simplicity is corrupted as it adapts to cope with the real world... There is hope, however; tools like `jq` never existed for xml.