It would only be overkill if you had to invent it yourself. But since there's an existing solution, use that.

The article went from destructors to the with-pattern. Once you start thinking about exceptions, you might reach for try-with-resources. With Async exceptions you might look at bracket. If you want composability, go for ResourceT.

Basically everything on the article is overkill. You just need to compose the XML contents declaratively... what is the most natural way to compose data.

The original API goes out of its way to be dangerous and hard to use.