Strong disagree. I like binary formats because I can just fopen(), fseek() and fread() stuff. I don't need json parser dependency, and don't need to deal with compression. Binary formats are simple, fast and I need a way smaller buffer to read/write them normally. I don't like wasting resources.
Binary formats (that you can just fopen(), fseek(), fread() etc.) are generally super platform dependent. You can read in an array of bytes and then manually deserialise it (and I’ve done this, for sure!) but that’s basically one step away from parsing anyway.
Hazard a guess that serializing demented data structures into something text encoded like json or yaml or XML/SOAP is no less painful than a straight binary representation aside from unfamiliarity of tooling to reason about and arbitrarily query the structure, like jq, lq, etc.
