hot take: regex is fine, actually, and most of the jokes about it being a problem are just Regex Strings Look Scary disguised as technical complaints.

@gsuberland That and "people trying to jam regex into things that are much better suited for procedural string-manipulation" like the email regex (and even that monster isn't fully RFC-compliant...)

I was the designated "regex wizard" on my previous team, even though the only things we used them for were pseudo-xpath stuff to grab the contents of a specific tag as a string (in addition to actual xpath stuff) and thus they were actually really simple, just long-winded due to multiple tag names.