I think that's a fair point. Unnesting arrays in SQL can be annoying. Here is your first example with duckdb:

  duckdb -c \
    "select * from ( \
      select unnest(assets)->>'browser_download_url' as url \
      from read_json('https://api.github.com/repos/go-gitea/gitea/releases/latest') \
    ) \
    where url like '%linux-amd64'"