I agree with you in broad strokes, but as a piece of anecdata: I've had a lot of success building tools that emit and consume JSONL[1] instead of entire JSON documents. JSONL preserves the Unix pipeline's inherently parallel design (people tend to forget this, even when waxing about the Unix philosophy!) but gives us all of the nice typing of a JSON stream.
That being said, I too will take a `sed` or `awk` one-liner over some of the `jq` monstrosities that I've seen.