Malformed data is a scalability problem. Unusual failure modes from coding problems to random bit flips become inevitable as the data volume approaches infinity.
Agreed, but the payload from the article doesn't seem to have suffered from astral radiation. Rather, random attempts at quote-escaping by someone who doesn't understand what they're doing. Also notice the "nan" value -- JSON has no concept of NaN.
But to be clear, error correction should be done at a level far lower than the parsing stage. It's usually a property of the storage medium or the firmware that accesses it.
If you have to correct for bit flips when you begin to read or parse data, it's too late.