Worse is highly subjective: the XML world spent millions of dollars layering on huge amounts of complexity but never made a corresponding investment in having common tools not suck. Things like validation and schemas still have a horrible user experience and then you have things like libxml2 meaning that most of the world can’t use XSLT or XPath features added a decade ago. Similarly, it’s been notoriously hard to find things in the XML world which have quality documentation, examples, or working validators — doubly unfortunate given the complexity of what they expect users to do.
If you have a job to do, JSON is just plain better on almost every count. I remember being excited by XML 1.0 back in the 90s but the fall in popularity is something lots of people worked hard to accomplish by building so many new, more complex things rather than fixing the foundation. The assumption that users will have to learn your standard is almost always wrong.