Most areas of Silicon Valley are militantly opposed to anything that looks like high-density construction. The government won't issue permits. The unsurprising result is that it has a really bad case of suburban sprawl, constrained by geological boundaries. Unfortunately, this means that even if you don't want to live in suburban sprawl and commute a long distance, it is pretty much mandatory in Silicon Valley because the city planners have essentially outlawed all other arrangements.

The insanity runs deeper when matched to their obsession with having more people use public transit. Public transit doesn't work in a low-density suburb larger than some states in New England. In typical fashion, the left-hand bans all development that would allow public transit to be usable and the right-hand insists that people should stop driving and take public transit. This is just one example; Silicon Valley is full of fundamentally inconsistent bureaucratic mandates.

This is one of those classic denial-of-reality cases that give Americans their famously low opinion of government. In some cases, it is entrenched special interests demanding these things; the sum of these policies may be insane but the politicians do not care as long as the special interests are happy.

JSON is wonderful because it is simple and unambiguous. It just works, and serialized data will always look the same.

This "JSON5" thing is an abomination. Use whatever quotes you like! More string escaping rules! Adding these things would make JSON worse, not better.

Here's another idea: why not write a tool that tidies up your hand-written JSON files? You could even re-use your "JSON5" parser to do it. That way you can be as lazy as you like when writing files, but not expect the rest of the world to learn your new dialect.