This isn't true though, right? If you were writing an org mode document about org mode, you now need an escaping mechanism to not mix your structure and text

Multi-language parsing is much harder to solve than simply enforcing some escaping mechanism in the inner protocol level and having tools do the "heavy" lifting (basically a solved problem).

Amusingly, no. Folks have done just that.

That said, you can define away a large part of the problem.

Edit: For trivial examples of "org-mode" in an org-mode document, you need only look at the documentation of org-mode. That said, I expect there to be limitations, because they make sense. Similar to how you can pretty print json inside a jupyter notebook, but don't expect to have a notebook interpreted in the notebook. (If that makes sense.)

Json enables you to chuck the notebook to any browser client anywhere on the net.

Org-mode is great, but you still have to install emacs.

Emacs is, amusingly, a lighter client than most browsers nowadays.

On point, a browser can not remember ifa notebook. Just parse the json. It can also parse text/plain. So, could show the org document without styling. The org document is actually readable. Json... Not so much.

To see the notebook, you have to have a Jupyter setup somewhere.

Edit: For example, see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/taeric/taeric.github.io/ma... which is the source for http://taeric.github.io/ChangeForDollar.html Not styled, and that is a short document, so probably woudn't be that tough to read in a json document, but I'm glad I don't have to.

How is a notebook without proper software to handle it in any way more useful then other structured plaintext-file? Yes, JSON can be prettyprinted in a browser, but what then? It's still a useless mess you can't work with.