The death of XHTML was brought on by the then crop of kids who don't want to understand how computers work and want it all done for them with someone else's code cause computer science is too hard and they'd have to think and thinking is too hard.

While I often hear this "draconian error handling" about XML/XHTML by such people who then complain that a language compiler is just as draconian and real programmers complain when it's not and doesn't catch their every little mistake.

It's this lack of education and drive for the pursuit of knowledge and understanding that caused XHTML to fall out of favor and no other reason.