Lawyers have no sense of humor is one way to say that they are risk adverse. After all, part of their job is to help their clients avoid worst case scenarios. Therefore, the weird kind of ambiguity in that license, which has no precedence to give the lawyers any ideas as to how judges would rule, is basically a big blind spot in the ability to manage risk.

Well, JSON is used in a serious way, in fact I doubt you can use most web applications (and many desktop apps too) without your machine parsing some json. And... https://www.json.org/license.html

That license does not cover the JSON spec; nearly all JSON parsers are not distributed under that license. I assume Crockford's original reference implementation of a JSON parser is released under that license, and not much else.

But JSON isn't software, it's just a specification. Any text that matches the specification is JSON, whether it is binary, a string, printed on a piece of printer paper, etc. So what does this license mean, exactly?

The JSON License was created to cover the original Crockford JSON parsing and linting libraries.

My employer specifically forbids us from using the json.org license because it's not considered FOSS