I think I would genuinely be pretty happy with a well-supported extension of the JSON spec that allows comments. Even if it required an explicit start and end of the comment (/* ... */). I also can't say I want or need anchors/references from YAML, so I think that helps me be quite OK with using JSON.

I appreciate the challenges of writing JSON, but also think it can be easier to spot issues if you have an editor that's doing magic indentation based on the JSON. Give me comments to help the humans, and I'm sold.