I'd argue this is more about quacking like a PowerShell than manipulating xSV/JSON in the pipeline. So here's my quick bunch of links that show the demand for that.

Here people emulate formatted and filtered ps(1) using GVariants and a bunch of CLI tools:

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2012/08/10/rethinking-the-shel...

Here people use SQL to query and format data right from the shell:

https://github.com/jhspetersson/fselect

https://github.com/facebook/osquery

Also, libxo is a library that allows tools like ls(1) in FreeBSD to generate data in various formats (e.g. JSON):

https://wiki.freebsd.org/LibXo

(edit: formatting)