> The sqlite library is tiny. Often smaller than some JSON parsers!

Stripped of all comments, the current "amalgamation" build of sqlite (which is the one most projects use) has 178k lines and 4.7MB of code. If your JSON parsers are anywhere near 1/10th of that size then they're seriously overengineered ;).

I cannot imagine such a json parser. You can parse json in only hundreds of lines of code.