It certainly seems like it does when the first example for flattening is oversimplifying an already simple structure that doesn't really need flattening. Maybe that was not meant to be a serious example but rather just for ease of understanding, but then the article should have probably said so.

> filtering based on multiple deeply nested attributes in different branches can make a query quite complex

Can you elaborate on this please? Maybe I'm just too tired to think clearly at 1 am, but I don't see how filtering is any harder. You would just do something like `jq '.foo | select(.bar.baz >= 42 and .qux.moo.asd == "abc")`.

Looking back at some other JSON output, like `ip addr`, I’m not seeing anything egregious. There are just a couple useless top-level keys in the `iostat` output that make the queries longer and don’t seem to add value.

Using the flat structure with a type field lends itself well to lazily outputting JSON lines, so maybe that’s why I tend to represent cli output that way. It’s sort of how you would format the data when sending to ELk or Splunk.

Since I initially thought of JC as a cli tool, I was trying to reduce line length. Even the name JC was selected so it wouldn’t significantly increase the line length. So not nesting data inside meta objects is something I would encourage.

For the purposes of making an example of how the concept is applied, making a verbose example is counterproductive. This doesn't require explanation because developers don't make work for themselves they don't need to, in practice.