Haven't used XML for them in over 2 years (excluding replacing legacy code and fixing typos). They went deep into XML+data binding which people liked for a while, because you could do UI tests without building the whole UI and such. But it wasn't so good in production because building everything from XML was making build times long. So while you could test that it's outputting the correct UI content within 2 minutes instead of 12, it also meant assert(1+1==2) took 2 minutes too.

I believe deprecating kapt now also breaks data binding, though I don't know if it breaks all the other basic XML layout stuff.