I think, when developers don't like working in XML, it's because the tool forces them to do the job properly.
That's work for whoever is producing the document, but wonderful for all the consumers.
That's work for whoever is producing the document, but wonderful for all the consumers.
I'd argue the same restrictions on "setting handwave to maximum" and "XHTML doc has one missing brace, no web page at all now" are two extremes that have their parallels in the 'dynamic vs static typing', 'immutable pure vs mutable impure functions', 'XML vs JSON (oh wait!)', and 'web app vs native program' arguments that we HN readers love to debate.
The trick is finding the happy medium between both extremes. Training some 'slackers' to "do the job properly" and convincing some 'purists' to be more pragmatic to the limitations of the world around them.
After all, we need something to occupy us during this Eternal September.
And in at least three of the four antagonisms you list, it comes down to the DX of the tooling. Static typing isn't so much of a pain if your type errors are helpful and descriptive. The missing brace in the XHTML doc is easily found when using proper and easy to use XML linters. And I don't see why writing native apps shouldn't be as simple as writing web apps. At least there are attempts that seem to get some mileage out of the idea (e.g. Revery, Flutter).
The trick is to make the toolset more approachable.
The flip side is that you will never find a JSON with the structure "{ "zoom": "startZoomMarkup" }5{ "zoom": "endZoomMarkUp" }".