The modern twist to that seems to be little miss Infinity https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/8f57i1/psa_ther...
I.e., if the value looks like JSON, it will parse it and return the object tree, otherwise it will return the original value as a string?
This sounds like a horrible idea in general - I'd say the authors of this forgetting that certain english words by themselves are valid JSON is a nice cherry on top but hardly the worst problem caused by this.