Scale is the important thing here. Even if you're a magical superior human programmer variant, json sucks once you cross over 50 lines.
Cloud Formation is a great example of the failures of JSON. Specifying just a single dynamo table with indexes and scaling roles in JSON is a hard to read cluster of a mess. Even with a good idea and json collapse / expand help, large json files are just insufferable to deal with as a human
I'd say if you're crossing over 50 lines, it's going to suck no matter what format you're in. Other solutions are not really going to fare any better than JSON at that level.
Cloud Formation is a great example of the failures of JSON. Specifying just a single dynamo table with indexes and scaling roles in JSON is a hard to read cluster of a mess. Even with a good idea and json collapse / expand help, large json files are just insufferable to deal with as a human