`jq` solves the problem of JSON in legacy shells. But I think the real problem is that the world is stuck using Bash rather than a more modern shell that can parse JSON (as well as other data structures) as natively as raw byte streams.
The problem with Bash is to do anything remotely sophisticated you end up embedding DSLs (a bit of awk, some sed, a sprinkle of jq, and so on and so forth) into something that is itself already a DSL (ie Bash).
Whereas a few more modern shells have awk, sed and jq capabilities baked into the shell language itself. So you don’t need to mentally jump hoops every time you need to parse a different type of structured data.
It’s a bit like how you wouldn’t run an embedded Javascript or Perl engine inside your C#, Java or Go code base just to parse a JSON file. Instead you’d use your languages native JSON parsing tools and control structures to query that JSON file.
Likewise, the only reason jq exists is because Bash is useless and parsing anything beyond lists of bytes. If Bash supported JSON natively, like Powershell does (and to be clear, I’m not a fan of Powershell but for whole different reasons) then there would be literally no need for jq.
