I was a bit unclear. When I get database dumps, I get them as Excel files or as an XML document.

Most of the times the documents I get are hierarchically structured.

Yes, JSON could be fine as well. But it simply lacks a standard toolchain which XSLT ans its ilk proides.

I am not trying to defend XML in any way. I just want to say the two things:

a) my customers never deal with JSON, but often with XML, so JSON (and other formats) are not an issue for me b) There is a very nice toolchain for XML, including formatters, tranformation tools, database publishing tools (my very own: https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html) and many others. I have not found such a toolchain for other formats.