Probably expands the API too much, but one missed use case I just ran into would be a .import function for loading a json list of records or jsonl directly into a table from the command line. This can be roughly replicated through readfile and some juggling, but will not work from stdin (I think? I would love to pipe json directly into a table).

The other alternative I considered was dumping the entire json blob into a one row table, before having a second query extract out the fields.