> directory tree is not as easy to view and edit as JSON.

    tree path/to
    cat path/to/key
    echo "1" > path/to/key

But my point is that you're not using the file system as a database. You're using it as an index, and haven't considered about multiple readers/writers to those individual JSON files that are doing the real work as databases. It's kind of like writing JSON into a SQL table. You can do it, but probably not to store important data within that JSON that always needs to be queried and ser/deserialized for any kind of read or write. If you need that, you probably want NoSQL.