What black hole are you sending JSON into where the only way they could know something is a date is if you use a date type? Why can't that be part of the data structure you agreed upon in order to communicate in the first place?
Even if there is an agreed on schema, parsers can generate native Date objects on the recipient if there is a date type. When you deserialize a nested graph of objects, it's hard to convert each date to an actual date if what you get is just a string. Makes it a lot easier during integration.
Why am I hand-writing code to supplement the parser? I mean, hell, we don't need JSON at all, why don't I just invent my own serialization format and write parsers for it in each environment I want to use it in.