"I really doubt anyone would chose to use it for anything new these days."

Funny how went from "use it for everything" (no matter how suitable) to "don't use it for anything new" in just under two decades.

To me XML as a configuration file format never made sense. As a data exchange format it has always been contrived.

For documents, together with XSLT (using the excellent XPath) and the well thought out schema language RelaxNG it still is hard to beat in my opinion.