[kibwen]

> And the more nested the format becomes, with arrays of dicts, or dicts of arrays, the harder it is to follow.

While I have some minor annoyances with TOML, I counterintuitively consider it a strength of the format that nesting quickly becomes untenable, because it produces pressure on the designers of config file schemas to keep nesting to a minimum.

Maybe some projects have a legitimate need for something more complex, but IMO config files are at their best when they're just key-value pairs organized into sections.

[integralid]

As far as I can see, nobody originally constrained the problem to config files. So I guess the problem with TOML is that it's only good for config files, while JSON and TOML are general purpose.

[kibwen]

Yes, I think that's a fair characterization. The priorities of config file formats are different than the priorities of human-readable arbitrary data serialization and transmission formats.