You can claim all the experience you want, but your statements belie the truth. JSON is in no way limited to raw data interchange, and the files puppet manages cannot be put off to one side in some magical place where root cannot access them. System administrators will always have access to the files no matter where they are or what permissions you have set, and they need to know that the files are being automatically managed. The system also needs to know where to find the files, you can't start randomly moving /etc/fstab around, for example.