[wholepointofcc]

That's a bit of a strawman. The cultural tradeoffs between "inspectable" JSON and "bloated" SOAP have to do with their most common consumption environment.

In my current life I work mostly with JSON and a typical workflow involves checking API documentations, querying the endpoints, and understanding the structure. I need to own the mapping between JSON and domain objects.

In a previous life I worked with .NET and C#, mostly SOAP APIs. A typical workflow involves right-clicking somewhere, pasting the link to the SOAP endpoint's WSDL file, and automagically getting a collection of strongly typed classes that I can manipulate directly and operate on as if they were domain objects.

The idea that when using SOAP one spends any time (manually) parsing and trying to make sense of XML is a misconception.

To put it in a modern parlance, one shouldn't compare SOAP to JSON. SOAP is JSON + Swagger, with the Swagger integration costing 0.