I thought Tim Bray's XML spec was one of the most beautiful tech documents I'd every seen when I saw it for the first time. Adding namespaces at that point in history though was a disaster. Back then developers just weren't used to that kind of rigor (when I first started coding Java I had to go to a website run by frickin' NASA to get a clear explanation of how namespaces worked.)

It didn't help that Microsoft dropped a stick of over-complicated standards that tried to bring RPC into XML. RPC has always been a cursed concept because between (1) trying to be intellectually coherent and (2) caring about performance RPC systems become incomprehensible and it doesn't matter if it is Sun RPC, DCOM, CORBA, "Web Services", Protocol Buffers, etc.

The fact that the "REST economy" is intellectually incoherent and could care less about performance seems to have helped it succeed. Right now I just wrote a javascript function that looks like

   const get_item = async (item_id) => {...}

and it does

   GET /item/{item_id}

and I have a Java function on the server that looks like

   Item getItem(String item_id)

and is tagged with some annotations that make it get called when that GET request. Jackson lets me write an Item as an "anemic domain object" that gets turned into the exact JSON I want and the only real complaint I have is that the primitive types are anemic so representing dates is a hassle.

The XML abuse I've seen at work is truly horrifying. We use protobuf for most of our inter-service IPC, but for one particular team one of their customers demands the use of XML so that it can be run through some XSLT "security" filters, so they have to transform a fairly large protobuf object into XML, run it through said filters, and then convert it back to protobuf :( I weep every time I think about it.