I don't think I've ever been limited by jq's speed, but good to know there are alternatives if it ever becomes a bottleneck.
Other than that I can't think of a reason to use this over jq; the query language is perhaps a bit more forgiving in some ways, but not as expressive as jq (and I've spent ~8 years getting pretty familiar with jq's quirks)
The limiting speed factor of jq for me is, by far, figuring out how to write the expression I need to parse a fairly small amount of data. I do a bunch of support analysis and often writing a one-liner to put into a shell script to extract some bit of JSON to re-use later in the script. Often this is going to be used only once by me or a customer to run some task.
Followed closely by figuring out the path to the area of data I'm interested in. "gron" has been a real time saver there - it converts the json into single lines of key/value - so you can use grep and find the full path for any string.
Switching to a GUI to browse the JSON that would let you copy the path to the current value would probably also help there, but, I'm usually in the terminal doing a bunch of different tasks looking through all manor of command outputs, logs, etc :)
Relatedly my primary use of ChatGPT has been asking it to write jq queries for me, it's not too bad at getting close. It's biggest blindness seems to be string values with a dash, which you have to write as ["key-name"].
I agree that figuring out non-trivial jq expressions takes a lot of time, often accompanied with a consultation of the somewhat lacking docs, and some additional googling.
Nonetheless, it is pretty slow at processing data. For example, converting a 1 GB JSON array of objects to JSON Lines takes ages, if it works at all. Using the steaming features helps, but they are hard to comprehend. It gets memory consumption under control and doesn't take super long, but still way too long for such a trivial task IMO.
I’m far more likely to parse json into clojure repl session and go from there these days. Learning jq for the odd json manipulation I need to do seems like overkill
Other than that I can't think of a reason to use this over jq; the query language is perhaps a bit more forgiving in some ways, but not as expressive as jq (and I've spent ~8 years getting pretty familiar with jq's quirks)