IMHO it's pretty comparable, the difference is only in the magnitude of insanity. After all, the industry did crap out these hardware XML accelerators that were supposed to improve performance of doing massive amounts of XML transformations — is it not the GPU/TPU craze of today?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_appliance

E.g.

https://www.serverwatch.com/hardware/power-up-xml-data-proce...

From your first link

> An XML appliance is a special-purpose network device used to secure, manage and mediate XML traffic.

Holy moly

At least arrays of numbers are naturally much closer to the hardware, we've definitely come a long way in that regard.

Exactly. Compared to microservices XML is a pretty minor problem.

Agreed. Also, Docker.