[hombre_fatal]

This doesn't really make sense to me. Just because JSON is human-readable doesn't mean that humans are meant to read any possible serialized data nor that it should always be an ergonomic read. Not everything you serialize is just a config file or hand-edited data. It may be arbitrarily dense with arbitrary data.

To me, this is kinda like seeing a JSON array of user IDs coming over the network and going "Huh? Why not usernames? I thought JSON was supposed to be human-readable!"

[twir]

I see your point; although if you look at the specs for a lot of easy-to-parse formats for computers, a stated design goal is also easy-for-humans (e.g. Markdown, YAML).

Large, complex object hierarchies with lots of nesting might make more sense represented in binary (e.g. Avro).

I realize I'm making a little bit of a McLuhan-esque argument in a largely computer science-oriented context, but I hope you can see what I'm getting at.

[ken]

Another example: source code is human readable (by definition), but that doesn't mean I can read any possible program. I struggle to read many programs with deep nesting, but that doesn't mean I'd find it acceptable for my compiler to crash in such situations.