Json would be terrible as a primitive.
I was imagining something more like erlang, which is very OS-like. The types are very permissive/fleixble, and there's lots of ways to transform and manipulate results or feed it into something else without feeling code-heavy. It still feels comfortable to do ad-hoc stuff. The advantage is that in erlang you usually don't worry about basic stuff like record and field separators.
"Perhaps "worse is better" more often when you are composing several programs/apps to make one system?"
That's probably true as you zoom out. But even basic utilities in posix within the same system require a bunch of parsing. Imagine if a function call in a programming language required an intermediate text format. That's how unix feels sometimes.