Probably you never _worked_ with XSLT (which is good for you). Very simple things quickly become 1K of unreadable text.

E.g. showing the last element of the list with different something ``` <xsl:for-each select="items/item"> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="position() = last()"> <span style="color:red;"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </span> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <span style="color:blue;"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </span> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:for-each> ```

Or ask chatgpt to count total weight of a shipping based on xml with items that have weights. I did and it's too long to paste here.

> It's not the most beautiful language, I'll give you that, but it's really not as bad as people make it out to be.

TBH I can say that about any language or platform that I ever touched. ZX Spectrum is not that bad, although has its limits. That 1960x 29-bit machine is not that bad, just takes time to get used to it. C++ is not that bad for web development, it's totally doable too.

The thing is that some technologies are more suitable for modern tasks then others, you'll just do much, much more (and better) with JSON model and JS code than XSLT.