This is a disheartening thing to read
As someone who doesn't do a ton of JSON parsing on the command line, I tend to forget jq syntax.
Two tools I really like are gron (make JSON greppable) from @tomnomnom and jqp ..., which provides a "tui playground for exploring jq."
98% of the time I end up being able to get what I need with gron + grep, then jqp is awesome for when I actually need jq :)
What's so bad?
With Python, all of this "syntax" and "greppable" and "interactive" goes away.
Stop using bash. Start using Python. Life is so much simpler. (And faster. And unit-testable.)