Its like garden plants that you struggle to keep alive vs weed that grew in a crack in a concrete runway

This will do nicely - I had several workflows where I’d hit an API and get a massive super nested JSON as output; I’d use jq to get the specific data from the whole thing and do a bunch of stuff on this filtered data. I pretty much resigned to using python because I’d have successively complicated requirements and looking up how to do each new thing was slowing me down massively.

also called two year old post it note that has never been taken off

How do you get complex data structures to work? I was alienated from scripting on zsh because I wanted something like a dict and realised I would have to write my own implementation. Is there a work around for that?

The important part is to learn the limits of any tool. Nowadays I no longer use jq for any long or complicated tasking. Filter and view data? jq is fine. Anything more and I just cook up a python script.

In case you’re not being sarcastic, et al is a shortening that means “among others” - usually authors of academic papers are clubbed together like this. In this context it is more like, “among other educational qualifications”

Is this navigation?

What alternatives do you propose?