You get this backwards. Tabular structured data to store are ubiquitous. Text as a file format is also ubiquitous because it is accessible. The only actual decisions are about whether to encode your variables as rows or columns, what is the delimiter, and other rules such as escaping etc. Vars as columns makes sense because it makes appending easier. There is a bunch of stuff that can be used for delimeters, commas being the most common, none is perfect. But from this point onwards, decisions do not really matter, and "CSV" basically covers everything from now on. "CSV" is basically what comes naturally when you have tabular datasets and want to store them in text. CSV tooling is developed because there is a need for this way of formatting data. Whether CSV is "good" or "ugly" or whatever is irrelevant, handling data is complicated as much as the world itself is. The alternatives are either not structuring/storing the data in a tabular manner, or non-text (eg binary) formats. These alternative exist and are useful in their own right, but don't solve the same problems.