I hate it so much. I got moved from a software role to a devops/platform engineering role after some contract shifts and it's miserable.
At least some years ago, I could cope by viewing it as "resume fodder" but that doesn't even matter anymore.
If we had to live in a world with YAML, that world would have been so much better had every library that emits YAML defaulted to "flow" style instead of "block" style. Well, and had the standard fixed things so that the "|" multi-line string operator worked in "flow" style. That's a very convenient operator for embedding scripts into configuration.
But no, apparently '{' characters are scary or something.
I have found that generating Kubernetes configurations using Jsonnet is quite pleasant. You don't have to use YAML. Jsonnet as far as I know, is the configuration language closest in semantics to Borg Config Language, which is what Google uses. I don't believe Googlers really thought people would use YAML directly. I think they assumed folks would use something nicer to generate YAML, which is the "assembly code" of Kubernetes configuration.
I’ll never understand why people don’t use JSON for generated Kubernetes definitions, which its API understands just fine. YAML is good when you need humans to read and modify it themselves, for config files and such. But why on earth would you use string manipulation tools to compose YAML templates? That takes a special kind of twisted cruelty.