>There is zero chance that comment is going to be seen if its just in a commit message,

I never suggested using a commit message, there are plenty of other ways to document these things and I'll leave that up to the user to figure out.

So now you've written this tome of a comment in package.json. What happens the next time someone installs a package using npm install? package.json gets rewritten, that's what. Your comment will be gone. I suppose you expect npm to somehow use AI to guess at how to rewrite package.json so it can put your comments in the correct places??

And expecting someone to read package.json before updating or installing a library is just as useful as putting it in a commit message. If you really need to be careful about dependency versioning, you better have more safeguards in place than just a comment in package.json.

>I simply cannot think of another file format that is used for configs that doesn't support comments.

I mostly see configs created as .js or .ts files, where comments are allowed. Not package.json. Never package.json, because package.json is guaranteed to be rewritten regularly. But maybe you missed that part of your bootcamp class? Yes, .js files can be used as "config". It's been done in plenty of projects. It isn't the end of the world. JSON also isn't solely used for configs or data that needs comments, in fact the majority of use cases in the world for JSON won't need any comments at all so writing comments in package.json is kind of an edge-case.

>I simply cannot think of another file format that is used for configs that doesn't support comments.

JSON isn't only a config file format. It's primary use is data transfer.