+1 on Johannes

SQL was designed for tables and does this job indisputably well. However, even adding dots, lateral joins, and variants, it was not made for nested, heterogeneous data and reaches its limits with many levels of nestedness or high sparsity/extra fields (aka, denormalized data, aka semi-structured data).

The underlying constructs behind JSONiq and XQuery (which are 99% the same, differing only on the "JSON finish"), in particular the FLWOR expressions (which support pipe-syntax-like clauses natively), were designed in a W3C standardization working group by some of the same experts who also contributed to or edited SQL.

I explain the reasons why SQL is not appropriate for denormalized data in my MSc course at ETH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBe6MlCM9EY&list=PLs5KPrcFtb...

You will also find our VLDB conference paper on data independence for messy data here: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol14/p498-muller.pdf

I hope it helps!