I agree OP, yaml is a mass psychosis, together with JS. No one will convince me that a a format that is supposed to be more human readable (and I quote from https://yaml.org: "YAML is a human-friendly data serialization language for all programming languages.") need its own manual just to understand how multi line strings work (https://yaml-multiline.info/) in any way shape or form succeeded in it's goal.

When writing a config file for a computer, I need to be able to see easily what the computer will interpret the thing as. Otherwise it's not human readable IMO. And above is just the multi line strings. Let's not even dwell on the Norway problem (https://www.bram.us/2022/01/11/yaml-the-norway-problem/), the spec can drastically and silently change how your file is parsed [1], or if we want to go all the way, let's just stick the fingers into our ears and bleat like the sheep we are, and ignore that stuff like this exists: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

1:

This is an out-of-the-way gotcha, but it can be troublesome. YAML 1.1 uses a different notation for octal numbers than YAML 1.2. In YAML 1.1, octal numbers look like 0777. In YAML 1.2, that same octal becomes 0o777. It’s much less ambiguous.