Interesting point, but I wonder if there's a little confirmation bias and/or circular logic there.
In other words that you don't see a use case for JSON columns because you don't think it's good DB design.
I know I have used them after decades of RDBMS work, and it feels like I'm "cheating" a bit. But they really do make sense for some use cases that can be harder to achieve with traditionally normalized RDBMS alone. For instance, for configuration options or scenarios where different objects may have a few different attributes, but are largely the same.
If you've ever used an entity-attribute-value data model or otherwise ended up with table proliferation or a bunch of nullable columns to accommodate the latter use case, you might appreciate the simplification JSON columns offer.
In other words that you don't see a use case for JSON columns because you don't think it's good DB design.
I know I have used them after decades of RDBMS work, and it feels like I'm "cheating" a bit. But they really do make sense for some use cases that can be harder to achieve with traditionally normalized RDBMS alone. For instance, for configuration options or scenarios where different objects may have a few different attributes, but are largely the same.
If you've ever used an entity-attribute-value data model or otherwise ended up with table proliferation or a bunch of nullable columns to accommodate the latter use case, you might appreciate the simplification JSON columns offer.