People who wanted to "get shit done" had much better alternatives. XML grew out of hype, corporate management forcing it, and bundling to all kinds of third party products and formats just so they can tick the "have this hot new format support" box.

But it used to be. And so it was used for a lot of things where it wasn't a great fit. XML works fairly well as a markup format, but for a lot of things, something like json models the data better.

> which case there's no excuse to overcomplicate things.

And that's a problem with xml. It's too complicated. Even if the basic model of xml is a good fit for your data, most of the time you don't need to worry about namespaces and entity definitions, and DTDs, but those are still part of most implementations and can expose more attack surface for vulnerabilities (especially entity definitions). And the APIs of libraries are generally fairly complicated.