While I suspect I would learn more writing a tokenizer and parsing logic myself I find grammars much easier to read and maintain.
ANTLR is pretty good and is supported across several languages and something I had previously used for some quick Elasticsearch query syntax munging in Python. It also means you can often start from an already existing grammar.
The JS version of ANTLR didn't seem to work for me so for the SQL/JSONPath stuff ended up using the Moo lever and Nearly parser which was rather pleasant. https://nearley.js.org