I hope that I live long enough to read the book-length historical treatment of the late 90s/early-2000s obsession with XML. My personal opinion is that it set the industry back by a decade. It just blows my mind the amount of effort (time & money) which was poured into such a flawed architecture.
Ditto Java, really. The early-2000s vision was one great mass of Java & XML. Why we didn't stick with Lisp & S-expressions I'll never know.
(One counterexample I can think of: you probably wouldn't do CDATA and comments the same way as XML did, which led to Kelby Ludwig's fantastic SAML auth bypass--which also gets a review in that blog post.)
The alternative was SGML. Would you have preferred that, because that was the 'only' over option at the time.
It would be like saying twenty years from now: "wow, I'd love to learn why people used fossil-fuelled cars instead of EVs: ICE cars are so inferior". Well, at the time nothing better had been developed and we did the best we can.
If you can cleanly separate the transport component's cryptography (making sure the content is secure and private) from the formatting and processing of the actual content it makes things a lot clearer.