Speaking of Tim Bray, in the 1990s people kept using XML in places where it wasn't appropriate.

There have been so many tech fads. Distributed objects (e.g. CORBA), mobile code, object databases, micropayments, push, WAP, and I want to give a special lifetime achievement award to VR which is now on its third hype wave.

NoSQL!

Rep from <NoSQL company> comes along, shows a CTO some graphs about how well it performs vs <BoringButReliableSQL>. If developers are unlucky CTO mandates a migration to NoSQL.

The last hype cycle, from about 10 years ago, I remember is that of BigData and associated technologies such as MapReduce, Hadoop, NoSQL DBs, data pipelines and so on. That lasted for about 4 years I guess? Then ML took over.

* Certain aspects of social networks (I remember leadership at google being convinced everyone will do online stuff on social networks in around 2011)

* To much smaller extent some core tech like NoSQL, SOA

* More recently - AR/VR bubble

XML is the only one that was really as egregious, iirc.

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