It just occured to me that JSON (with some exceptions) can be a subset of Python, and parsed as such without the help of json module.

Say, if we have a sample JSON, which includes all of the value types (object/array/string/numbers/true/false/null):

{
  "numbers": [123, 123.456],
  "booleans": [true, false],
  "null": null,
  "string": "string"
}

we can parse it using eval, by complementing null/true/false with corresponding variables:

# `sample` is a string representation of the above example
eval(sample, {}, {'null': None, 'true': True, 'false': False})

which results in a proper Python object:

{'booleans': [True, False],
 'null': None,
 'numbers': [123, 123.456],
 'string': 'string'}

This, of course, doesn’t handle certain cases, like string escape sequences. And the solution overall isn’t safe, and shouldn’t be used in a production code. Nevertheless, I find the trick interesting.