Jq is a great tool, I wish more people knew about it!
I use jq to mangle get/list requests from AWS (and others) and then recursively hit each element for whatever reason. Without jq none of my workflows in this area would be remotely easy.
TLDR: Learn JQ! It is like sed and grep, but for JSON.
Unless you need some additional juice, where jq supports actually transforming the return.
Quite arguably a heavier tool, e.g. a boto3 script becomes appropriate where --query falls short.
But options are a great thing to have.
Jq is so much more capable than jmespath that I find myself using jq on the json output of AWS CLI commands more than using the built-in query option. Sure, it requires another tool, but it’a often the best tool for the job.