Structure is a tool. Like any tool, it can be misused or overused.
For anything even remotely production-y I'll always prefer explicitly parsing JSON into a known structure, but there's a lot of value in in being able to do some exploratory scripting without those constraints.
not necessarily. there is a bottom up school of thought that encourages people to noodle around and construct primitives by playing in the domain, and then interactively composing those primitives into larger and larger systems.
Yeah, that's true. It's a judgment call for sure, but I've always found that angle on things to be self-subversive. The best programmers I know are all bottom-up learners, not top-down.
For anything even remotely production-y I'll always prefer explicitly parsing JSON into a known structure, but there's a lot of value in in being able to do some exploratory scripting without those constraints.