[munificent]

I believe JSON5 didn't exist when we first wrote pub. If it did, it certainly wasn't widely known.

Obviously, migrating to it now when there are thousands and thousands of packages and dozens of tools all reading pubspecs would be much more trouble than it's worth.

[lucideer]

Understandable. I just checked & JSON5 was just 1 year later but even then it would've taken a lot longer to gain sufficient traction to be well supported.