I think it'll bite some people, but probably is the better default for JSON specifically. Most of the nil-maps-become-null thing is just an extension of Go defaulting to nil for empty arrays and maps, which is usually not what you expect when you're writing a JSON schema like

    type ListUsersResponse struct {
        Users []User `json:"users"`
    }

in Go. It's pretty common have code like

    userRows := db.Query(...)
    var users []api.User
    for _, user := range userRows {
        users = append(users, api.User{...})
    }

where you don't _really_ intend for the default nil-ness to leak out. (Apologies for any broken syntax, I'm realizing in real time that it's been a while since I've written Go)