CSV (well TSV) as a format is a simple as it gets: one special code as field separator, and another one as line/record terminator. Only that CSV/TSV use chars available in text editors rather than the proper (archaic) ASCII C1 codes. Whatever the author has against CSV, I feel like starting a war against CSV is crazy, since any alternative is going to be worse when the problem isn't the format as such, but folks misusing it or using it wrongly (eg. broken XML in RSS, broken JSON, whatever).
Despite the similar names, TSV and CSV are very different, in more ways than just the delimiter. In particular, CSV tries to handle escape sequences but its various implementations do so in different ways. TSV just disallows tab characters within fields, so its specification extremely simple: https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separa....
And then a field needs to contain one of those characters and everything breaks. And they're designed to be human editable, so the solution is to complicate parsing by using quoted fields instead of escape characters. Although someone might choose to use escape characters because there's no spec so they can do whatever they want.
I think if only editors and shells supported control codes better and gave them a sane visual representation, we could see a revival for them. Feels like a waste to have them and not to be used.
