Yaml has terrible footguns. I'd rather we keep experimenting and find a new optimum.
Toml fixes some issues with shallow Yaml, but sucks at deeply nested data.
Maml looks nice at cursory glance. It seems to do nesting, numerics, comments, and strings right.
We're really close to having a great format. I'd like to see more attempts before accepting what we have as permanent.
You can find footgunless parsers
Very often (probably the vast majority) the people writing the YAML aren’t the ones choosing which parser is being used by the software consuming it.
If you are writing a software system that needs potentially human edited config files, yaml is the best for human edited files if you, software architect, use a footgun less parser.
Yaml is popular like python because indentation as a scope depth indicator is far more visually intuitive for low skill programmers than braces (c,json) or counting/matching parents in lisp or begin end tags in xml.
Sorry your kubernetes ecosystem didn't do that. Why not get them to change parsers? A hell of a lot easier than changing k8s to toml or maml.
Because ultimately that's what the frustration of yaml comes from, right? Kubernetes config?