how many billions of compute are wasted because this industry can't align on some binary format across all languages and APIs and instead keep serializing and deserializing things

ASN.1 and its on the wire format BER and DER have been available for close to 30+ years and it is running on billions of devices(cryptography, SSL, etc) and other critical infrastructures.

but, it is very boring stable, which means I can't tell the world about my wartime stories and write a blog about it.

JSON is not really the core issue which is the expression parser. "user.name = foo and user.id > 1000". Even if you were operating on binary data, turning an arbitrary pseudocode string into actual function logic + executing it would be the slow part.