Douglas Crockford addressed this many years ago: write your human readable config with comments and run it through a pre-processor to strip them out before handing the config to a JSON parser. Seems like almost no one picked up on the idea.

That is such a horrible non-solution. It breaks all tooling which isn't aware of your particular preprocessor and adds a compilation step to every configuration.

That avoids one of the benefits of having a text based format; I would use TER and convert to DER (where TER is a text format and DER is a binary format, and which is what I do with some of my programs).

(Text formats do have some benefits, but binary formats have different benefits.)

> write your human readable config with comments

The question then becomes: what format is that?

> Seems like almost no one picked up on the idea.

Seems to me more like almost no one thought the idea was any good.