What LaTeX is
A LaTeX table is a tabular environment: a column specification, ampersands between cells and double backslashes at the end of each row.
Academic papers, theses and anything typeset with LaTeX or written in Overleaf.
What JSON is
JSON is a text format for nested data: objects with named keys, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans and null. It has no date type and no comments.
Every web API, most configuration files and anything that talks to JavaScript.
What changes when you convert LaTeX to JSON
The tabular body is read, rules are dropped, and escaped characters are unescaped. Text wrapped in textbf or emph is reduced to the text itself.
You choose the shape. An array of objects is the default and the one most code expects. A 2D array is smaller. Column arrays suit charting libraries. A keyed object suits lookups by id.
What carries over from LaTeX to JSON
LaTeX records 2 things about a table that JSON has no way to hold.
JSON wants a type for each column, and LaTeX does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
JSON has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
Anything visual in the LaTeX - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in JSON and is dropped. The values are what survives.
This is the direction that recovers structure: LaTeX has no table in it to read, only an arrangement that looks like one, so the rows and columns are inferred rather than read.
The identifier 007 comes out of the JSON as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a JSON file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the JSON.