Readit NewsXHTML would have made the Semantic Web (capital letters) possible. Someone else could have done search better. We might have had a proper P2P web.
They wanted sloppy, because only Google scale could deal with that.
Hopefully the AI era might erode that.
io_uring is very cool tech though and has been progressing at an impressive pace the last few years.
While coppicing does results in fairly straight trees, they're still circular and will result in large amounts of waste if you try to cut dimensional lumber out of it.
Kinda mind-boggling how this has been parodied since forever [0], yet is still true. And we're not even talking about the Soviet-style production organization where frugality was never paid more than lip service: you'd think that in a competitive environment there'd be enough pressure to save up on the input resources wasted.
The linked article in turn links to a research paper at https://www.woodresearch.sk/wr/201202/12.pdf, and while that paper does support that only ~20% of a tree gets sawn into long pieces of (construction) lumber, it absolutely does not support that the remaining 80% is waste. For example, ~37+9= 46% goes to the production of chip and particle boards, a decent amount becomes firewood, the paper industry takes some "waste" wood as input for cellulose production, sawdust has a variety of purposes and even the leaves and stumps can simply be composted.
But that universe did not happen.
Lots of "modern" tooling works around the need. For example, in a world of Docker and Kubernetes, are those standards really that important?
I would blame the adoption of containerization for the lack of interest in XML standards, but by the time containerization happened, XML had been all but abandoned.
Maybe it was the adoption of Python, whose JSON libraries are much nicer than XML. Maybe it was the fact that so few XML specs every became mainstream.
In terms of effort, there is a huge tail in XML, where you're trying to get things working, but getting little in return for that effort. XLST is supposed to be the glue that keeps it all together, but there is no "it" to keep together.
XML also does not play very nice with streaming technologies.
I suspect that eventually XML will make a comeback. Or maybe another SGML dialect. But that time is not now.
It got abandoned because it sucks. New technology gets adopted because it's good. XML standard were just super meh and difficult to work with. There's really not much more to it than that.