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Depending on load patterns, for an internal tool that might be perfectly reasonable; you can trivially look at the history, for one thing.

Is this not how you update a JSON column on a db that doesn't have (or you choose to not use for reasons) a native JSON type with a sprinkling of data should be immutable?

Well without some form of locking you have a race condition. Two updates done at the same time can have the overwrite the other

One team in my company insists on storing everything related to a target in an MB-size Elasticsearch document and then do all the aggregation client-side, because they already use ES for everything else and don't know how to use a relational database.