Adding: in fact, gron's simplicity is downright inspired. It looks like all it does is convert your json blob into a bunch of assignment statements that have the full path from root to node, and the ability to parse that back into an object. Not sure why I didn't think of that intermediate form being way more greppable. Kudos to the author.

Just as an example, this just took me about a minute to get the data I wanted, whereas I probably spent a half an hour on it yesterday with jq:

  curl -s https://static01.nyt.com/elections-assets/2020/data/api/2020-11-03/national-map-page/national/president.json | gron | grep -E 'races.*(leader_margin_votes|leader_margin_name_display|state_name)' | grep -vE 'townships|counties' | gron -ungron