I see the appeal of that - I used to toy with a language whose default representation was XML (with two way translation from/to text as well as a diagram based editor), but XSL is way to verbose a syntax for me to interface with what is a very simple core you can build out as a library to write the same kind of tree rewrites.
Today I'd pick that option over actually using XSL anywhere - to me the only redeeming feature of XSL itself is/was the built-in support for applying XSL to XML in browsers (I worked on a web app ~2006 where XML was translated to HTML using XSL on the frontend, and you could turn off the server-side transformation and let the browser do it instead, which meant your source view was the underlying XML, which was very handy for debugging).
Today I'd pick that option over actually using XSL anywhere - to me the only redeeming feature of XSL itself is/was the built-in support for applying XSL to XML in browsers (I worked on a web app ~2006 where XML was translated to HTML using XSL on the frontend, and you could turn off the server-side transformation and let the browser do it instead, which meant your source view was the underlying XML, which was very handy for debugging).