Yes, awful. It takes a crack in the wall and drives a bus through it, at a significant penalty to readability. The compatibility advantage doesn't matter when you're evaluating syntax in a vacuum.
It is terse for a reason. You're ordering a parser around in 10 characters. Which makes them fit everywhere! A longer more readable version starts taking up multiple lines and looking like shitty react code. Or you're just using your language's string primitives. But there is a reason that nobody does that any more -- who wants to read 50 lines of string parsing code when a couple dozen characters of regex will do the same thing?
