> useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase

Thanks for the insight! Is this what JSDoc/Swagger is now used for?

> I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON?

I'm not sure actually. I haven't personally seen the code, I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML. Maybe it's just their lack of documentation that sucks, but it's become a running joke whenever we get a new partner that the team integrating it jokes that their API is XML.