The limiting speed factor of jq for me is, by far, figuring out how to write the expression I need to parse a fairly small amount of data. I do a bunch of support analysis and often writing a one-liner to put into a shell script to extract some bit of JSON to re-use later in the script. Often this is going to be used only once by me or a customer to run some task.

Followed closely by figuring out the path to the area of data I'm interested in. "gron" has been a real time saver there - it converts the json into single lines of key/value - so you can use grep and find the full path for any string.

Switching to a GUI to browse the JSON that would let you copy the path to the current value would probably also help there, but, I'm usually in the terminal doing a bunch of different tasks looking through all manor of command outputs, logs, etc :)

Relatedly my primary use of ChatGPT has been asking it to write jq queries for me, it's not too bad at getting close. It's biggest blindness seems to be string values with a dash, which you have to write as ["key-name"].