Why Your Config Files Break After Every Upgrade (and How Plain Text Fixes It)

Ever had that moment where you upgrade a tool, open your project, and suddenly half your configuration is unreadable? Maybe it's a binary .dat file from a build tool that changed its serialization format. Maybe it's a proprietary project file that the new version "migrated" into something your teammates on the old version can't open. I've been dealing with this exact problem for over eight years across different stacks, and I keep arriving at the same conclusion: plain text is the most resilient