Let’s say that hypothetically one were to disagree with this. What would be the best alternative format? One that has ample of tooling for editing and diffing, as though it was text, yet stores things more efficiently.

Most of the arguments presented in TFA are about openness, which can still be achieved with standard binary formats and a schema. Hence the problem left to solve is accessibility.

I’m thinking something like parquet, protobuf or sqllite. Despite their popularities, still aren’t trivial for anyone to edit.