There's a bonus third option: I started writing python professionally in 2007 and nowadays spend 75% of my "hands on keyboard" time working on kubernetes YAML and I am indeed having a good time.

I admit, I hastily misread the tail end of your comment as (e.g.) "A reason YAML is bad because you have to copy-paste from the web and that sucks"; not as you probably meant it "in this special hell, you must deal with copy-pasted nbsp and other trash". So maybe I did not know exactly what I was signing up for ;)

I don't deal with anything like that and not entirely sure how it happens to people enough that it is a common complaint. "undecidable formatting fuckups" are a non-issue in my life, I really don't understand how people encounter such things. Maybe they need to fix their editor/IDE/tools? Skill issue? IDK.

As a tangent- I don't care what language code is written in, it had better be indented properly (and linted, and follow the project's codestyle, ...). Our juniors learn pretty early that their change requests will be blocked on formatting alone by CI, and a human won't even bother reviewing the substance of their change if they don't follow convention. I don't hear them ever complaining about any of these things, least of all semantic whitespace ... and we have a rich culture of bitching about menial/pedantic things ;)