It's a big pain when decoding XML. That's not the only impedance mismatch. The fact that XML is just a soup of objects is not how programming language objects work either.

https://docs.rs/serde-xml-rs/0.6.0/serde_xml_rs/#caveats

Look at how much more complex this is than the equivalent JSON code, which requires none of these annotations:

https://docs.rs/strong-xml/latest/strong_xml/