YAML seems to be one of the most polarizing things in the software industry. I'm personally a big fan of it, though I agree with the author that it becomes a pain once you start trying to use it like a DSL or templating language.

I use it in pretty much every project, but I've worked with people who've said they hate it with a burning passion. And it's kind of a trope to see anti-YAML manifestos on HN and /r/programming fairly regularly, both as article submissions and comments.

As you mentioned, one of the most useful features for me is the ability to write raw strings with single quotes (or by omitting quotes). I've been in many situations where and I and others have had to maintain regular expressions in config files, and it's so much more of a hassle with JSON due to the escaping requirements.

The opening of the article states "Hot take: YAML isn't a configuration language or a configuration language format, it's a serialization format."; I have the exact same opinion, but with "YAML" swapped for "JSON". (And maybe the author would agree with that, too.)