The syntax makes perfect sense when you understand the semantics of the language.

Out of curiosity, have you read the jq manpage? The first 500 words explain more or less the entire language and how it works. Not the syntax or the functions, but what the language itself is/does. The rest follows fairly easily from that.

For better or worse, Claude is my intuitive interface to jq. I don't use it frequently, and before I would have to look up the commands every time, and slowly iterate it down to what I needed.