I can see where jq might confuse someone new to it, but their replacement is irregular, stateful, still difficult, and I don't even see variable binding or anything.
jq requires you to understand that `hello|world` will run world for each hello, passing the world out values to either the next piped expression, the wrapping value-collecting list, or printing them to stdout.
it's a bit unintuitive if you come in thinking of them as regular pipelines, but it's a constant in the language that once learned always applies.
this zed thing has what appears to be a series of workarounds for its own awkwardness, where they kept tacking on new forms to try to bandaid those that came before.
additionally, since they made attribute selectors barewords where jq would require a preceding reference to a variable or the current value (.), I'm not sure where they'll go for variables should they add them.