Even though it’s not ideal, I actively prefer JSON over every other random format I’ve come across. This is speaking as somebody who mostly has to tweak existing configs, rather than extending them or writing new ones.

YAML (along with I guess TOML etc) looks nice at first glance, but it has too many weird syntax shortcuts that make it hard to figure out what’s actually going on. And googling for syntax like “[ ]” is hard!

With JSON, the data model is super simple, and for a given set of data there’s only one way to write it down. Sometimes the data model is too simple, sure. But even for fiddly cases like dates and times, there’s often an obvious solution (in this case, ISO 8601 strings).