[meowface]

If you're doing a lot of JSON munging every day and have good mastery of something like jq or zq, you can probably get things done faster.

Like you, I almost always just write Python scripts for such tasks because it's a lot easier for me to reason through it and debug it, but it's definitely slower-going than what I might do if I were very adept in a terse language like jq. I don't do this too often, so it makes little difference to me, but if someone is doing this multiple times a day, every day, it'll add up. As you say, it takes a few minutes; with jq, it could be a few seconds.