Ruby does fine with #2. Fans of static type systems love to overstate perceived drawbacks of dynamic languages, but the simplicity of reading Ruby code built around JSON.parse vs. Scala or Kotlin with Jackson more than makes up for any type safety from the compiler.

Also, there's a sort of intermediate step, a dynamic language with schema validation, for which I wrote a modestly well-used (within the overall schema validation gem market) gem a while ago. Then you can validate at the point of translation, without being beholden to a concrete data type (POJO, data class, case class, etc.) that has to be updated whenever the wire format changes.