I think it does, I should not require an external dependency for JSON. Having standard JSON support is far far more useful than another micro optimizations.

fifteen years ago that would have been XML and twenty-five years ago SGML and in ten years it'll be TOML or protobuf or something so...

Eventual deprecation is not a valid justification for making current technology less useful.

Now I would buy your argument if C++ were as conservative as C, but it clearly isn’t. It keeps trying to push itself as a modern general purpose language, while ignoring what it actually takes to be useful as one.