Automatic serialization is not the devil, overly forgiving automatic serialization is the devil. I use JSON serialization libs all the time in Scala which properly support optional vs required fields. For Java devs, Gson has bad required/optional support [0] but Jackson does have it for creator properties [1]. It is important to qualify statements like your initial one to include the specific situation which it is bad instead of using a broad brush.

0 - https://github.com/google/gson/issues/61 1 - http://static.javadoc.io/com.fasterxml.jackson.core/jackson-...