Affinity really is a great alternative and it’s relatively cheap. There was a concern that when Canvas bought the company they would force a subscription model on it but apparently that’s not the case (yet).

I envy you

Work takes all the fun out of coding for me. I haven’t touched a side project for a year.

No arrays are not allowed. Attributes can only be strings. But the children are kind of an array.

There is actually an extension to JSON: https://json5.org/

Unfortunately only very few tools support that.

Since XML can have attributes and children, it’s not as easy to convert to JSON.

Your JSON example is more akin to:

<address street_address="21 2nd Street" city="New York" ...></address>

JSON not supporting comments is a human rights violation