[GordonS]

I also have a hard time for the same reasons. I'm torn though; I want a config format that's super easy to read, and that I can easily change anywhere with nothing more than sed/vim/nano/notepad - but I also want to avoid typos and formatting problems.

I'm not sure which is the lesser evil.

Actually, I think (as always), that it depends. For something simple like a config file for an app, JSON/YAML is usually fine.

But for something more complex, like IaC (Infrastructure as Code) definitions, I think perhaps "proper" programming languages might be more beneficial. I had a look at Pulumi just yesterday, and I very much like the idea of writing a simple C#/Typescript app to deploy my, when compared to something like HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) or bash scripts that wrap the Azure/AWS CLI tooling.