If somebody needs performance, they probably shouldn't be calling out to a separate process for json of all things, no?

(Honestly, who even still writes shell scripts? Have a coding agent write the thing in a real scripting language at least, they aren't phased by the boilerplate of constructing pipelines with python or whatever. I haven't written a shell script in over a year now.)

If Ms performance is a main concern, you shouldn't use jq. Believe it or not.