Sure, but a program like jq will essentially throw a type error if you try to pipe it stuff that isn't in a format it can do something with. Generally speaking

Sure, but a program like jq will essentially throw a type error if you try to pipe it stuff that isn't in a format it can do something with. Generally speaking you're not going to get silent errors when you try to extract formatted data from plain text content. And at the point that you need types, maybe the shell isn't the place to be doing that data manipulation?