it's crazy how our progenitors had the wisdom and foresight to reserve FOUR distinct delimiters for us 28-31 file/group/record/unit but webdevs are just nope we'll go with commas and crlfs and when that doesn't work we'll JSON
JSON is probably popular because JS was popular and it’s a subset. And being a programming language that’s is typed by humans, so those special characters would not have naturally featured.
For data, if we are going to use reserved characters, maybe we just use protobuf and let the serialisation code take the strain.