> Personally, I've never found text-based formats to be a good choice for data that humans will rarely need to read or write; I much prefer simple and efficient binary formats, which can be just as extensible without the additional inefficiency and needlessly-introduced-failures of string handling.

Many modern serialisation / deserialisation libraries (like Rust's serde) let you serialise your data structures to a variety of formats, including both JSON and various binary formats of your choice.

But it should also be relatively easy to take any binary format, and define an alternate text based format for it that allows one-to-one conversion in both directions. A bit like assembly vs binary machine language.