Prefer toml over yaml. Large Yaml files are a nightmare to edit with all the special spacing. JSON might be comment unfriendly but it is easily editable.
They just need to have a version of JSON with comments: JSONC and JSON is good.
As a heavy YAML user for a while (writing and maintaining Open API Spec files), YAML is also a catastrophe. I should not have to "debug" a config file because some tiny whitespace issue is off.
JSON as config isn't good, but YAML is not a silver bullet.
Definitely agree that YAML is not a silver bullet. One thing that I’ve found to improve my YAML editing experience is to use a YAML language server [1] backed by JSON schemas. It provides a real time feedback cycle rather than handing the file off to another program to choke cryptically.
json5 is a neat idea, but if you’re going to use a serialization format that isn’t json, yaml is the way to go, despite its known minor inconveniences. Everything can read json and yaml. Not much can read json5.
They just need to have a version of JSON with comments: JSONC and JSON is good.