I guess I just don't agree that those are your only two options. Consider, a nested JSON structure is essentially N-dimensional. Even something as simple as a list of people is effectively multidimensional. You have the dimension of the list, and then you have the dimension of the the structure representing the people. Which, itself, my have multiple dimensions.

Consider, a large part of the literature of machine learning is talking about taking a hypercubes and consequences of most distance/volume measures. (Quickly searching, https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/27388/what-d... talks about this.)