I usually plug jq as being like "awk for JSON data" (in that just I think of it more in terms of doing "awk-y" things with it than sed like things (e.g. I want to pull these "fields" (some set of keys from an object) out of each line (each textual line of the file being a JSON object)).

At any rate seconding it as a highly recommended useful thing to have lying around on your PATH somewhere. Check out the @csv and @sh formatting modifiers which can be handy wrangling JSON from the command line (search for "Format strings and escaping" in the manual).