>First, there is modeling ambiguity, too many ways to represent the same data structure. Which means you can’t parse into native structs but instead into a heavy DOM object and it sucks to interact with it.

I don’t get this argument. There exist streaming APIs with convenient mapping. Yes, there can exist schemas with weird structure, but in practice they are uncommon. I have seen a lot of integration formats in XML, never had the need to parse to DOM first.