[retzkek]

Maybe you'd like jsonnet: https://jsonnet.org/

I find it particularly useful for configurations that often have repeated boilerplate, like ansible playbooks or deploying a bunch of "similar-but" services to kubernetes (with https://tanka.dev).

Dhall is also quite interesting, with some tradeoffs: https://dhall-lang.org/

A few years ago I did a small comparison by re-implementing one of my simpler ansible playbooks: https://github.com/retzkek/ansible-dhall-jsonnet

[BiteCode_dev]

If I have to use a better format, I will use toml or cue.

The whole point of the parent is that JSON is the Pareto solution, which I agree with.

But it does grind my gear.

[paulddraper]

jsonnet is turing complete.

It's configuration with a build step. Which is an option, but that's pretty different than JSON, YAML, TOML, etc.