yeah! I agree with this. I use plain TLV (which is very close to this IFF format) and is similar to how PNG stores all its chunks in a single file. As you mentioned.

I got grief for saying that I prefer TLV data over textual data (even if the data is text) because of how easy it is to write code to output and ingest this format, and it is way, WAY faster than JSON will ever be.

It really is a very easy way to get much faster transmission of data over the wire than JSON, and it's dead easy to write viewers for. It's just an underrated way to store binary data. storing things as binary is underrated in general.