That's a remarkably insightful rebuttal. I sure see the errors of my way now. Except I'm not really sure whether these are in the Output, Error, Warning, Verbose or Debug stream, so...
But ...
1. *> is a thing
2. see above, I agree that Start-Transcript could be better and include all
3. Just provide your own massaged JSON
4. Not a pwsh problem, problem in general. For example take a look at Invoke-Builds `exec` as one way to handle this
Silly how you need sh to do a very basic thing in PowerShell
or use -Depth parameter...