I did it to create templates (svg with jinja2) that I then parsed to generate unique images as svg.

Inkscape made a nice initial template, but lacked finesse and precision with naming, scaling, text-wrapping and nesting. Inkscape came up with a rather messy blurp of XML. No clear IDS, rounding errors, arbitrary nesting through groups, arbitrary ordering, etc.

Being able to open a file to quickly change the fill color of a figure for example is nice.

I first did it with inscape and the file size of the simple logo I was editing went up by 6x due to the inscape metadata so I did it manually.

I have done it, but only for some very simple stuff like a logo constructed from a small handful of coloured circles. I certainly would not recommend it for more complicated work.

It's actually not that hard...

But yeah, I did. Quite a few times. I even did a SVG path to G code converter once.