A practical benefit for using JSON-LD in API development is being able to link every field in the response directly to a definition, ideally a shared one such as schema.org. This overlaps a bit with definition formats like OpenAPI (Swagger), RAML, et al, but to completely replace those, you'd need a media type that documents the API semantics.
It's possible to use JSON-LD in an opaque fashion by remapping all of its reserved keys to whatever your JSON looks like, i.e. from "@id" to "href" which is more familiar. It doesn't have to look like an ugly mess of "@" prefixes, for example: http://micro-api.org/#finding-resources
It's possible to use JSON-LD in an opaque fashion by remapping all of its reserved keys to whatever your JSON looks like, i.e. from "@id" to "href" which is more familiar. It doesn't have to look like an ugly mess of "@" prefixes, for example: http://micro-api.org/#finding-resources
(disclosure: I am the author of Micro API)