>It's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done?

People who wanted to "get shit done" had much better alternatives. XML grew out of hype, corporate management forcing it, and bundling to all kinds of third party products and formats just so they can tick the "have this hot new format support" box.

XML is perfectly fine. What are these alternatives?

YAML is just bad. JSON is harder to read for deeply nested structures. TOML and the like don't have enough features.