That "impression" most likely comes from purposeful propaganda that originates from competitors of V (Vlang). It's a really twisted and foul story of how they tried to suppress the language. ZeQLplus, Papyrus Compiler, Lilly Editor[1][2] (author, Tauraamui, did a recent video interview), etc... Are among many examples of fun useful apps that people write in Vlang all of the time, with various ones being in existence for years.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvFHT0N9inw (Just Try Out New Languages - part of a longer interview)

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462676 (TUI editor and Vim/Neovim alternative)

[3]: https://github.com/vlang/awesome-v

I assumed it was to make it easier working with the files programmatically. Eg using jq or one of the many many other solutions for JSON in shell scripts.

The pf language is also shockingly readable for a firewall config

Sounds about right, but they also don't need to, all the OpenBSD specific configuration is mostly done in the same manor, meaning that if you know PF, then the configuration language for httpd, relayd or OpenSMTPd isn't all that foreign to you.

JSON is generally a pretty poor configuration language, so I wouldn't hope that it would be adopted.