JSON with significant whitespace is just everything bad about JSON and a little bit worse, though.
Removing comments from JSON because some people might use them for parsing directives was an overreaction. The alternative always presented is to pollute your objects with "comment" values which, unlike actual comments, take up space and need to be parsed or filtered. Just imagine how silly it would be in any other language for comments to be replaced with variables.
And... nothing is stopping people from adding parsing directives in JSON itself anyway.