I haven't used Java in a long time, so I don't what the library ecosystem for JSON is, but with both C and C++ there are plenty of parsers that make type casting and working with JSON data about as easy as in python. The difference is usually that the type of the underlying data one is interested in working with is explicit and, when the JSON data is malformed is caught earlier (at cast, as opposed to later, when trying to, e.g. add a string to an int in sane languages that break when that happens).