Can you elaborate on common misuses you see?

Do you mean just passing around values as key-value pairs in hashmaps instead of something meaningfully typed, or something else?

It sort of sounds like you want a ~yaml config that's unmarshaled to an object.

LMAO that's exactly the kind of pattern I'm ranting about. I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not.

I don't mean to a hashmap; I meant to a pojo/dataclass/whatever.

Sure but it's the overly general hashmap based interfaces everywhere which includes these canned serialization formats that's the issue. Someone else in this thread posted noyaml.com which is a great summary of the issue there.