> JSON-LD processing doesn't seem to solve any problem developers face in the real world
To me, it's the opposite. Without JSON-LD, my application needs to have a bunch of parsing/serializing code in order to talk with everyone else. With JSON-LD, we could just rely on any RDF library and get the data structures that we need right away.
By avoiding JSON-LD, you end up dealing with *more* complexity, not less.