That is a very interesting take! Adding to that line of thinking: obviously we need the textual representation for reading - so we need something to translate

That is a very interesting take! Adding to that line of thinking: obviously we need the textual representation for reading - so we need something to translate it. That situation is kind of dual to programming languages and compilers - we use compilers to make the textual representation machine readable, here we need a decompiler to make the machine readable data textual. But if you start from a programming language, it surely do have something to describe data structures. That would already be unambiguous. That is why JSON is useful.