The moment my JSON has any sort of depth and I need to write a parser for it and potentially account for unspecified behavior. JSON's nice when it's nice, but it's terrible when it's terrible. It's 100x easier to write SQL than writing jq and... dear god if I have to use grep -A or -B, I'm doing something wrong. Constraints are actually a good thing!

The underlying database isn't the most important thing. Just use SQL. Its namespacing (eg, through CTEs) is good and you're more likely to have colleagues who know SQL compared to jq.