I rather like this idea.

Basically take all of the “let’s all write parsers now” work of handling the plain text output of *nix coreutils and bundle all of that work into a single tool. JSON is then the structured output data format, which should then replace all of the parsing work with querying work, which should be nicer and easier.

Backwards compatible, kinda unix-y, optional and should play nice with existing tooling. I hope it works out!