Vast majority of skilled developers are now using Polars, unless they are constrained by lack of Narwhals support in their third-party library of choice (e.g. Great Expectations, SHAP). That's the more important trend to follow.
In that regard, I’m still waiting for a credible jq replacement…
I have a toy project I use for learning different tools. Given a CSV containing every MLB game ever played, calculate the win percentage for each team during its first season.
Pandas makes that kind of simple thing painfully unintuitive. Tools like Polars and dplyr and even SQL require code that's far closer to how people think.
Also, try fx.wtf as a replacement for jq. it comes with a in-built tui viewer that supports vi-keybindings. Ecmascript is built into fx.wtf so you can query the JSON with JS notation (where JSON was born). You can use any JS functions including map/reduce/filter or perform any kind of transformation instead of learning jq dsl that you will forget tomorrow.