The advantages of CSV are pretty massive though - if you support CSV you support import and export into a massive variety of business tools, and there is probably some form of OOTB support.
You have a (usually) portable transport format that can get the information into and out of an enormous variety of tools that do not necessarily require a software engineer in the middle.
I'm also struggling with such a quick dismissal of human readable formats. It's a huge feature.
What happens when there's a problem with a single CSV file in some pipeline that's been happily running fine for years? You can edit the thing and move on with your day. If the format isn't human readable, now you may have to make and push a software update to handle it.
Of course, CSV is a terrible format that can be horribly painful. No argument there.
But despite the pain, it's still far better than many alternatives. In many situations.
while IFS="$(printf \\a)" read -r field1 field2...
do ...
done
Getting records that contain newlines would be a bit trickier.
...I found it - the question is under review by the Austin group for inclusion in POSIX.