Hijacking the plain text discussion to ask what the best tools are to convert plain text to lexed/parsed output?

I'm assuming any tool in this regard would expect the user to write an EBNF grammar.

I found ANTLR to be nice but it's way too convoluted to use as a tool with Java dependencies and seems to be stagnating. And tree sitter just is too convoluted and requires the added C/C++ overhead to understand how to use it.