> I just use linters now and presto literally all of my problems ever with YAML gone.
Copy a valid fragment of YAML from one file into another file, run the linter, and presto! garbage. Whitespace-indented formats are poison for auto-formatters. They might have made sense back in the 90s when such "advanced" tooling was rare, but they're a bad choice today.
I don't understand this. If you copy a piece of JSON out from one file to another without thinking it will also result in garbage. You need to know where to place code. That seems reasonable to me.
If you copy&paste an object {"a": 5, "b": 6} or an array [1, 2, 3] from one JSON file to another (or from one location to another in the same file), then the structure of the result is unambiguously determined by the opening and closing delimiters {}[]. When you do the same with an indented YAML fragment, the indentation level at the source location might be different from the indentation level at the destination, wreaking havoc on the structure of the result. You have to manually adjust the indentation of the pasted fragment before auto-formatting the file, or else the information about the intended indentation is lost.
Copy a valid fragment of YAML from one file into another file, run the linter, and presto! garbage. Whitespace-indented formats are poison for auto-formatters. They might have made sense back in the 90s when such "advanced" tooling was rare, but they're a bad choice today.