Particularly if you prepend queries with try. jq likes to throw errors when unexpected things happen in your search or your data, and it may return "null". Using try instead returns an empty string.
When walking JSON structures to validate data I code each validation separately instead of burying them in blocks of if-then-else logic. I think this makes it easier to maintain and more obvious when dealing with data that for example may be in a list or an array of lists.
But yeah if you write golang scripts and want to shuffle data in and out of bash, jq is your #1 power tool.
