I'm sure you realize it gets reassembled into "huge opaque strings" when it is fed into the LLM as context. The arbitrary transport of the context as JSON is just a bit of protocol theater.

You don't really have to parse the output, Python already has a parser in the form of the AST library[1].

But I get your drift. Depending on your workflow this could seem like more work.

[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html#module-ast

I think about this occasionally trying to rationalize it. I see similar patterns in other things like R and Julia where they design something in the environment to seem like a composable tool, and maybe it is but only within two or three specific compositions and then the way the environment is described sure seems to imply some kind of universality but it just doesn't work. Some even seem to keep patching every leak (maybe Spring means Spring a leak? Haha) and there's a sunk cost fallacy thing with an immense documentation page.