As much as I love jq and it has helped me, it always has an „awk“ vibe to me which is one of the tools I use less despite its capability, because of the same reason: I tend to forget all the special syntax over the years.
Compare that with „gron“ ( https://github.com/Deitar13/gron ), which is arguably not as powerful and clunky, but it allows me to compose and tie into the other unix tools way better.
It‘s mainly for that reason I use it more than jq these days for ad-hoc analysis.
AWK and JQ definitely suffer from "power-creep" as shell tools. IMO they are unreasonably powerful; full-fledged scripting languages masquerading as simple text-processing tools.
Part of the blame is definitely on the fact that the "idiomatic" way to filter columns in a shell pipeline is to invoke AWK: `awk '{print $3,$5}'`. Similarly for JQ. Virtually every sysadmin and programmer gets introduced to these languages as Unixy tools when in fact they are antithetical to the Unix philosophy.
The result is ending up with overcomplicated "production" pipelines (curl|sed|awk|jq) when you really could be writing one far more coherent, maintainable, scalable C, Go, Python, etc. program with their standard libraries.
This. I stopped writing shell script for the exact reason. When something is more complex than launching a couple of commands, and involves for example JSON processing, I write the script in python.
I realized it after wasting multiple hours debugging problems at work in scripts that used jq or AWK or similar tools and most of the time the problem was solved by quoting randomly things, except when discovering that there is the edge case that I didn't considered and the program broke, again.
Now when I have that sort of problems I don't even bother trying to fix them, I just rewrite the whole script in python (they are usually small scripts so it's a question of 15 minutes most of the time). And writing new script in bash is banned (except particular cases).
Also there is the concept of portability, most people assume that everyone has a way to install that tools because they have on their system, it's not that simple, and while putting things in production or on the CI it breaks because jq is missing. And good luck with Windows, by the way.
Compare that with „gron“ ( https://github.com/Deitar13/gron ), which is arguably not as powerful and clunky, but it allows me to compose and tie into the other unix tools way better.
It‘s mainly for that reason I use it more than jq these days for ad-hoc analysis.