Comment by gizdan

JSON in shell might not be faster (or it might be, I've not benchmarked), but it certainly is more efficient to do select and filter and whatnot using something like jq. It's not about network, it's about making the output more predictable when running a script. I've lost count the number of times I've tried to capture a specific part of the output of a command only to be tripped up by an edge case like spaces or something else.