I was just going to say, jq is like sed in that I only use 1% of it 99% of the time, but unlike sed in that I'm not aware of any clearly better if less ubiquitous alternatives to the 1% (e.g., Perl or ripgrep for simple regex substitutions in pipelines because better regex dialects).

Closest I've come, if you're willing to overlook its verbosity and (lack of) speed, is actually PowerShell, if only because it's a bit nicer than Python or JavaScript for interactive use.