[dub]

JSON is the default serialization format that most JS developers use for most things, not because it's good but because it's simple (or at least seems simple until you start running into trouble) and it's readily available.

Large values are by no means the only footguns in JSON. Another unfortunately-common gotcha is attempting to encode an int64 from a database (often an ID field) into a JSON number rather than a JSON string, since a JS number type can lead to silent loss of precision.

A more thoughtful serialization format like proto3 binary encoding would avoid both the memory spike issue and the silent loss of numeric precision issue, with the tradeoff that the raw encoded value is not human readable.