I agree, and I feel like the reason to this is the mere existence of 'jq'.
Without 'jq' working with json in a Unix shell would be a lot more uncomfortable, but not impossible.
I want to say server side JavaScript plays a role in this too, but I’m not a JS developer.
There's some decent cookbooks/recipes but they're still 1/5th as big as they could be.
A bash script might need to execute it and you want something without lots of funny characters or whitespace as it's going straight in to the terminal.
That necessary terseness makes it the opposite of readable.