I usually want to reserve the noun like "author" as the embedded record after a join. That way "author_id" is always the key and then "author" is the json_agg j

I usually want to reserve the noun like "author" as the embedded record after a join. That way "author_id" is always the key and then "author" is the json_agg joined object that embeds the whole record. Otherwise you're actually introducing ambiguity imo.