Not that long, browsers implemented JSON.parse() back in 2009. JSON was only invented back in 2001 and took a while to become popular. It was a very short window more than a decade ago when eval made sense here.
Eval for json also lead to other security issues like XSSI.
Problem is, it took until around 2016 for IE6 to be fully dead, so people continued to justify these hacks for a long time. Horrifying times.