[coldtea]

There is a big but though: whether the loss of interoperability for those cases was any real loss. Those people wanted their own files parsed a specific way by their own infrastructure. Their files already weren't meant for every regular JSON parser: if they wanted wider interoperability they'd had dropped those comments.

And nobody stops them from continuing to use those meta-parsing semantics even if JSON-standards prohibits comments.

I think Crockford was wrong in his objection. It shouldn't have been his concern.