I don't have any links to prove my point but I suspect we need to thank Mongo for pushing the traditional SQL databases to support JSON.
I don't see how Mongo was built based on Postgres, either?
I might be misremembering, though. And there's a possibility that what I read then was inaccurate.
The relevant data structures and indexing mechanisms (hstore, tsvector, gin, gist) were all available -- if only experimentally -- before Mongo launched.