About bloody time!
XE has been getting so long in the tooth, I like it as it comes with APEX built in. It's good way to get to play with Oracle with very little hassle, especially for devs who just need to check code compatibility, especially as installation is *next**next**next* and click "Start DB" icon.
To be honest though unless you have to support Oracle going forward most new dev is going FOSS options from the get-go. I say that as a 20 year Oracle DBA. there's so many new and exciting DB options to play with out there especially in the NoSQL camps, online stores like DynamoDB are really good fun.
Years ago you had to tweak and tune DBs to maximum effecniciency, many hours I've spent fightin with SQL to tune out just a few more ms to get it up to spec, in some cases you still do but I get to tune SQL maybe half a dozen times a year now.. Now you can buy a gazillion buckets of computing power for pennies and so simply having a DB like MySQL or PostgreSQL is suitable for most purposes where you just need to store a terabyte or two of data online and archive out the rest to XML or JSON offline dumps.
XE is worth having a play with just keep your core Oracle skills up to spec as it's tiny and happily sits out of the way but the days when most places simply bought Oracle, SQL Server or DB2 without thinking are long gone now. Oracle will go the way of Lotus or IBM, slowly fading into the background as they get used less by new generations who are cloud orentated ( indoctrinated? ) and they favour the faster and simpler systems with replaceable serverless components, not a always a bad thing though.