If yaml didn’t have anchors and 8 different white space formats, it’d be a great replacement for this kind of thing.

But yaml is a mess, and you’d think you could parse it easily, but you can’t.

I’m a fan of NestedText. It’s no panacea but I’d argue it’s the most well-considered and useful file format for structured data in plain text.
There just needs to be one universal standard that handles everyone’s use cases
No, for multiple standards that handle their usecase good.