There is a difference between semantics and implementation. There is nothing forcing you to turn a JSON object into a hash table. You can easily store it into a

There is a difference between semantics and implementation. There is nothing forcing you to turn a JSON object into a hash table. You can easily store it into a list of pairs. However the semantics are obvious, this is a mapping, order doesn't matter and there shouldn't be duplicates. If you just see a list of pairs it is less obvious what is meant. That being said you can easily argue that the JSON data types aren't expressive enough to capture many common semantics so you end up needing external documentation anyways.