It's not the YAML spec's fault, but

I somewhat agree... Yaml 1.2 spec is underutilized, and there are too many 1.1 compatible parsers in the wild.

However! The Spec defined alias and anchor, the spec defined loading, emitting, when it should have just called it serialization and deserialization.

There are also other points of problem. Why do we have three block kind of string (unquoted, folded and literal)? Why is there three kind of flow strings(unquoted, single and double quoted)? Why is everything so context (flow/block) sensitive?

The problem with YAML spec is that it tries to serve two masters: be a JSON compatible spec, be compatible with Python like whitespace sensitive config.