This is unquestionably hillarious, and there are for sure some questionable "features" of yaml. But all this yaml hate recently seems to be hate that would be better directed at the garbage CICD toolkits that come with things like github, azure dev-ops etc.

YAML is good for human readable configuration, with some notable caveats. But its terrible for being a secret programming language where the only way to execute it is to put in a PR request, commit to a live branch etc.

We basically need Restricted YAML.

No 1000 ways to say true/false. No 1000 ways to have strings.

No significant whitespace in config files (also helps out with the 1000 types of YAML strings).

Etc.

A subset of YAML that drops all that garbage.

And yeah, the CI/CD stuff should also use... a sandboxed programming language.

I think Lua and Tcl can remove functions and language constructs in a sandboxed enviroment. Pick one of those, or improve it slightly (make Lua 0-index based if you so care), and then use that.

There already is strictyaml: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml