What makes JSON wonky?

Personally the only thing I miss from it is support for binary data - you end up having to base64 binary content which is a little messy.

Quoted keys, strict comma rules, very limited data types, are the main ones. There are a host of others if you view it through the lenses of user-read/write, and a different set of issues if you view it as a machine data interface. Trying to combine the two seems fundamentally misguided.

I consider JSON's very limited data types to be part of what makes it so good.

Lack of comments seems like a big one seeing as it's so widely used for "configuration". It's a big enough downside that VSCode and others have violated it via ad-hoc extensions of the format.

The comma rules introduce diff noise on unrelated lines.

Insert the xkcd about 15 competing standards . . .

Standards do die off, up to a point. XML is widely used but the last time I really had to edit it in anger working in DevOps/web/Python was a long time ago (10 years ago?).

At this point XML is the backbone of many important technologies that many people won't use or won't use directly anymore.

This wasn't the case circa 2010, when I doubt any dev could have really avoided XML for a bunch of years.

I do like XML, though.

Probably the world's most over-used and misused comic strip. JSON wasn't created as a response to a situation where there were too many data interchange standards.