[briHass]

That was my first thought: JSON is highly amenable to compression; due to the repetition this blog is complaining about. It's a good lesson for junior devs: if you find yourself thinking about saving bits and bytes with custom protocols, you need to pull out of the rabbit hole and find the existing solution to your problem.

Sure, for a local data file or something where it's nice to be human-readable-ish, CSV can be a better choice than JSON (assuming you use a library for all the edge cases and string escapes.) If you really want a super-small and fast serialization, that's what protobuf is for.