Helm local code execution via a malicious chart

If we're being honest, YAML is one of the dumbest ideas of the last 20 years to have proliferated. How we got from XML to here I cannot comprehend.

This is not the first RCE involving YAML and it won't be the last.

Why we settled on a file format that relies on invisible characters I'll never know.

You use invisible characters whenever you press Enter or Space. If you're referring to Tab, many of the most popular programming languages like Go and Python use them as part of their syntax.

The reason YAML was popularized is because it was a response to XML which isn't user friendly to write. It's unfortunate that the spec got so convoluted, and uses a lot of implicit behavior, but I'd rather write YAML than XML, JSON or TOML for things like configuration files. Nowadays there might be better alternatives, but YAML is the de facto standard.

It's also unfortunate that YAML got abused by people who wanted to turn it into a DSL, so we ended up with thousands of lines of Ansible playbooks, CI workflows, and Helm charts, but here we are.

It's unfortunate, but inevitable. Every structured text data format that sees widespread use, given enough time, will eventually be turned into a DSL.