"Warped"? Java didn't exactly have built-in JSON libraries in 1999. The plethora of alternatives manifested largely as a response to the complexity and weight of using an XML parser. Prior to XML you mostly rolled your own parser by hand, use lex/yacc or (if you were using Lisp) used s-exps. Compared to the first two options XML still has a number of meaningful benefits: uniform parsing across languages, uniform validation, and proper handling of encodings. Those aren't anything to sneeze at. "Unicode everywhere" is a fairly new phenomenon (and XML is partly to thank for that), even if Unicode isn't. And different Lisps handle encodings differently as well.
I chose the term warped as at some point it seemed like XML was used for _everything_, in many use cases the problem was warped to fit an XML solution. For example, simple configuration data made less readable via a poor fit of XML, and the excessive number of these cases.
One of my favorite sayings is still "XML is like violence. If it does not solve the problem, you are not using enough."
