IMHO it's pretty comparable, the difference is only in the magnitude of insanity. After all, the industry did crap out these hardware XML accelerators that were supposed to improve performance of doing massive amounts of XML transformations — is it not the GPU/TPU craze of today?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_appliance
E.g.
https://www.serverwatch.com/hardware/power-up-xml-data-proce...