There's plenty of historical examples of sub-optimal standards developing enough traction and network effects that the whole industry is stuck with them for dec

There's plenty of historical examples of sub-optimal standards developing enough traction and network effects that the whole industry is stuck with them for decades. Initially you did need to pull in a library to parse JSON, it wasn't part of the JS language until Crockford pushed for it (via his later position of authority at Yahoo working on YUI). Particularly in the early web, the need for async "liveness" of pages didn't exist, so pages didn't consume backends directly. Everything was handled on refresh or navigation and server rendered as HTML. It was only after AJAX-style web apps took off (post-Gmail, really), that JSON started to get real traction. There were no JSON parsers in C#, Java, Python, etc initially. XML was far more common and SOAP was generally used for cross-endpoint communication.