> The problem is, programmers can't dictate what JSON should look like in the wild.

Not JSONs in general, but a sane API would never return something like that.

> We used to have strict typed XML. Nobody even bothered.

Nowadays there is OpenAPI, GraphQL, protobuf, etc. and people do bother about such things.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time you need to deal with other people's APIs.

>We used to have strict typed XML. Nobody even bothered.

Yeah, because it was ugly as hell and not human-readable.