You're right in the same technically-correct sense that parsing HTML 4 is easy: it's just SGML! And as long as you don't have to support any of the crazy deviations from the spec that some people have come to rely on, that's fine.

There's a whole spectrum of unofficial parser "helpfulness" here, with HTML 4 being an extreme case of parsers filled with hacks to deal with existing broken data, protobufs being an extreme case of parsers doing the One and Only True Thing, and JSON mostly toward the same end of the spectrum as protobufs, but a bit less so.

Yeah, that spectrum is a good way to think about it.

JSON hits a sweet spot of being very easy for computers to deal with almost all the time, while also being reasonably easy for humans to read and write.

I was going to add “if you started with that as the spec, it wouldn’t be hard to design something better than JSON” but real examples like YAML are pretty awkward, so probably it’s a harder problem than it seems.

I think it's the other way round: JSON mimics the syntax of JavaScript literals and the syntax was meant to be easy for humans to write and read. Not super-easy, because it has to be easily parseable as well, but still the original use case of this notation is to write relatively short pieces of code. This is why it seems easy to people and they assume it's easy for computers as well, while in fact JSON is hard for computers to emit because of the trailing comma issue (not super-hard, but harder than XML, which has no separators: elements are self-contained).

Yes, I really wish trailing commas were standard.

But they’re not, so we have to resist the temptation to use them!

It would be much easier to emit if they were standard. For example, in XML each element is self-contained; I can pour it into the data stream without knowing if it is preceded or followed by a sibling. With JSON I have to manage the context.