I can understand people not wanting to write Makefile and most of them just ends up being .phony and a bunch of shell code in many cases.

Taskfile might be great for many use cases, but yes, why not just write a shell script. Almost every time I use a CI system, I end up falling back to just having it run a shell script, rather than relying on many of the build in features, because they are almost always a bit contrived. The same can be said for Makefile replacements, they try to predict what people need, and in the end it ends up being a fancy way of running a script.

You don't have to choose one. M approach is to keep most "tasks" in separate script files and use Task (or just, or make, or doit, or...) to call and glue them together.

XML is verbose. That’s the problem.

YAML is ridiculously complex, with a bunch of surprising behaviour.

I would take XML over YAML any day.

Basic XML is fine, maybe a bit verbose

But when you start getting into why are some things properties, or values, XSD or what not, then no.

Nobody has time for those thick XML books

You can choose to use XML without XSD. That's entirely up to you.

You cannot choose to use YAML without the string 'no' becoming boolean false.

Plenty of people complain about the complexity with XML, and there is a valid argument there. Using it as an argument in favour of YAML is kind of ridiculous.

If I had the choice of yaml and XML I'd probably choose XML.