> that is not backwards compatible

This would be a massive breaking change for Kubernetes. There are piles and piles of YAML all around the opensource that would need updating. It would be very hard to adopt.

Also, quoting strings 100% of the time just looks ugly in my opinion. Not a big deal with autogenerated YAML, or YAML that I do not maintain, but for anything handwritten it's annoying.

how is it annoying...? it's literally like that in almost every single language out there. IMO seeing unquoted strings in YAML feels weird.

As I said, it's subjective. I like this

    image: my-repo.com/my-app:v1
    imagePullPolicy: Always

more than this

    image: "my-repo.com/my-app:v1"
    imagePullPolicy: "Always"

That's all. Not sure about quoting keys though.

is it a massive change? yes, will it cause serious problems for existing apps in production? yes. but think of this as one of those python 2 to 3 moments. They could improve the spec dramatically and cut the parser down by a crazy amount to detect edge cases. It ll be a bright direction forward for YAML