Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has to be satire right? Like, you aren't out of touch on this. I get engineers maybe making the argument that $300k / year on cloud is the same as 1.5 devops engineers managing in-house solutions, but for just json parsing????
I wonder if you've ever worked on a web service at scale. JSON serialization and deserialization is notoriously expensive.
I highly doubt the issue was serialization latency, unless they were doing something stupid like reserializing the same payload over and over again.