Well, these are B2B customers, who are huge companies. We have actually had customers say they can't even find which servers are running the code, so could we "pretty please with money on top" just make it work anyway....

Sometimes you actually have to deal with what you get, and can't just "fix the other end".

To be fair, a favorite tagline of the Go community is "it solves real problems". Dirty JSON (with no simple way to fix it) is a real problem.