Human readable formats should exist for more or less one purpose, interfacing with a human, eg configuration.
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Of course people can read binary formats. It is just that they read them more slowly, and it requires quite a bit of exposure/practice, so that people usually invest in tooling to simplify the process.
I suggest that when you see a comment like this, you ask yourself “if I change ‘human readable’ to ‘easily human readable’ would I need to offer my correction?”
And devs don't care about just config files put API requests and responses and any other kind of structured/semi-structured communication and data.