Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think the issue is that it’s hard to manually parse. The problem is that it’s hard for someone else to read your ad-hoc parser years later and reason about what you did if they need to modify it. Disclaimer: I am the author of the article and JC.
This is even more true for the ungodly long `jq` incantations that people write. It's like I get it, the old way is ugly and not always easy to decipher but at least it's shorter and your chances of understanding it are better. I've had both -- the classic piped chain of UNIX commands and various JSON-producing tools piped to `jq`. The former were still easier to work with.
Yes, I have seen those too! That’s why I also wrote Jello, which is like jq but uses pure python without the boilerplate. Python is nearly universal now and typically easy to read, though more verbose. Jq is just as much a write-once tool as awk and perl for more complex queries. For simple attribute calls, though, it’s both terse and readable.