…, it's JSON use make it more conceptually compatible with the rest of the world and various other things.
It's also a lot easier to write Varlink services than D-Bus, because it allows you to handle each connection in a different process, thus being compatible with codebases that do not have event loops (D-Bus due to its multiplexing forces you to process all messages within the same process, and due to the global ordering within a single event loop).