Other than lists which can be represented by JSON arrays, hashes do fine jobs at describing most data and most "objects".

This post goes off the rails almost immediately with "Normally this would work fine, but let’s consider that the user could pick any of the keys that are present in any JavaScript object as a name." WTF? The author almost immediately is confusing his/her current situation with the request body and what's in it.

Then we find ourselves quizzically with "We therefore change our code to leverage hasOwnProperty". Umm, I don't think most developers would find themselves "therefore" doing this.