But what about all those hours I spent torturing myself learning jq's filter syntax, and jmespath ?

At first I thought that it is like SQLite, but for JSON, not just "JQ-lite".

Speaking of JSON and queries, it is worth to mention DuckDB's JSON features. This allows you to use actual SQL to query JSON.

Here is example of a DuckDB analogue of $.orders[?(@.status.#equals('delivered'))][*].items from JQLite documentation:

duckdb -c "from (from demo.json select unnest(orders)->>'status' as status, cast(unnest(orders)->'items' as json[]) as items) select unnest(items) as delivered_items where status='delivered'"

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                 delivered_items                 │
│                      json                       │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ {"productId":"p1","quantity":1,"price":1299.99} │
│ {"productId":"p2","quantity":2,"price":1599.99} │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

https://jqlang.org/

I've been using that for all my JSON extraction and processing needs. Let me automate a bunch of my builds for JS stuff for FoundryVTT https://gitlab.com/foundry-azzurite/pings/-/blob/master/build/build.sh

https://github.com/bazaarvoice/jolt

You might want to look into using some form of parameterized queries.