As someone who actually wrote a JSON to (limited) SQL transpiler at $DAYJOB, as much fun as I had designing and implementing that thing and for as many problems it solved immediately, 'tail wagging the dog' is the perfect description.

    SELECT email FROM users WHERE deleted_at IS NOT NULL OR status = 'active'

seems more semantic to me at first glance than piping this into a JSON->SQL library

    {
      "_select": "email",
      "_table": "users",
      "_where": { 
        "deleted_at": { "_is": { "_not": SQL_NULL_VALUE } },
        "_or": [
          { "status": "inactive" },
        ]
      }
    }

which is usually how these things end up looking.