[bananas]

Actually no you couldn't be more wrong.

XML can be read as a stream and at certain points like after reading an element or attribute, an object can be created on the fly or a property on an object set and the type deserialised at the same time. The types don't have to be native types either; they can be complex types or aggregate types such as any numeric abstraction or date type you desire.

See java.xml.stream (Java) and System.Xml (CLR) for example.

As for readability, some XML is bad which is probably what you've seen but there's plenty that's well designed.

XML is afflicted with piles of criticism which usually comes from poor understanding or looking at machine targeted schemas that humans don't care about.

You'd complain the same if you looked at protobufs over the wire with a hex editor.