For everyone pining for a Jq with a different syntax: I have a bunch of links to alternatives collected, you might want to try some of them (some may be for different things than JSON):
My personal favorite solves the same problem but attacks it differently.
> Make JSON greppable!
> gron[1] transforms JSON into discrete assignments to make it easier to grep for what you want and see the absolute 'path' to it. It eases the exploration of APIs that return large blobs of JSON but have terrible documentation.
Personally I'd prefer Fennel, which is on Lua and thus a whole lot faster, especially in regard to the startup time—but as I noted in a thread on Fennel, Lua's omission of a proper ‘null’ makes it awkward to handle exchange and transformations of data from third parties. And, since I'm likely to fiddle with the queries for some time, startup delay is less important here.
https://github.com/fiatjaf/awesome-jq
https://github.com/TomConlin/json2xpath
https://github.com/antonmedv/fx
https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq
https://github.com/simeji/jid
https://github.com/jmespath/jp
https://github.com/cube2222/jql
https://jsonnet.org
https://github.com/borkdude/jet
https://github.com/jzelinskie/faq
https://github.com/dflemstr/rq
Personally I think that next time I might just fire up Hy and use its functional capabilities.