If you’ve found the (excellent) jq tool for working with JSON a bit unwieldy… check out zq and see if you like its API any better. I wouldn’t put too much weight on the faster aspect, though:

We will cover zq’s performance in a future article, but to cut to the chase here, zq is almost always at least a bit faster than jq when processing JSON inputs

Almost always at least a bit faster is not something you’re likely to notice in practice.