Normally, detecting errors on the other end of a pipe requires care in a shell environment (e.g. retrospectively checking PIPESTATUS). I used an approach I've called Stream Poisoning. It takes advantage of the fact that control characters are never present in valid JSON. When jb fails to encode JSON, it emits a Cancel control character[1] on stdout. When jb encounters such a character in an input, it can tell the input it's reading from is truncated/erroneous. This avoids the typical problem of a pipe silently being read as an empty file.
I've got a page explaining this with some examples here: https://github.com/h4l/json.bash/blob/main/docs/stream-poiso... I can imagine using control characters in a text stream being rather controversial, but I feel it works quite well in practice.