If the price to pay is that there is some risk some dummy might start parsing the comments as code, so be it. This is not a really a problem in "regular" programming languages, I don't see why it would be in a configuration language.
But, then, I have to behave like a typical computer nerd and say..
Well ackchuallyyyyyy:
> "This is not a really a problem in "regular" programming languages"
Browsers do stupid: <!--[if IE 8]>Linux does stupid: #!/bin/bash
C/C++ (preprocessor marcos) do stupid: #ifdef
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comment_(computer_programming)
It’s not a “magic comment” because it doesn’t depend on the runtime. It specifies an interpreter to use, regardless of the language of the file.
Eg you can use #!/usr/bin/python for a Python script. I don’t find it worse than the existing alternative of making the file name magic and finding and interpreter based on that.
It's a comment ignored by the interpreter (bash, python, whatever).
The kernel just says "Hey! You can't execute a text file, you weirdo! I'll just read the very first line of the text file and if it happens to be a comment that points to another executable, I'll run that and pass it this file."
Plus non standard stuff is not a valid argument. As there are many tools which support non standard behaviour, because useful features like comment are considered non standard