For many people regexes are as bad as the jq queries… and vice versa. I would not recommend to write python script instead of regexp, but indeed it may work the same for small data and be more readable.
I love régex and been mastering it since 1999. So much that in 2013 I used it in production to parse binary protocol with dynamic sized fields. I believe the project is still talking 10k plus devices. Google must’ve just released protocol buffers… I would love to finally see regexes which can work over custom flow of objects and also on trees.
I also loved XPath which is very powerful and very comprehensible, then there is CSS1/2/3 which are again for queries to structures tree like data.
The prospect of now learning jq does not appeal me that much even though I appreciate its ingenuity. I may recommend it to dev/ops colleagues now and then, but for me this syntax is a lot of additional cognitive pressure which does not necessarily pay up. Of course if there is large amount of JSON data - it is the Swiss knife.
But nowadays I’ll likely use some LLm to generate the jq query for me. Also would joke with my bash-diehard colleagues who would love one more DSL…