How I built an interactive JSON visualizer in the browser (no react-flow) (opens in new tab)

Every time I debugged a deeply nested API response, I scrolled. I counted brackets. I lost my place. After the third or fourth time of doing this for the same Stripe webhook, I gave up and built a thing: paste JSON in one side, see it as an interactive graph on the other. The result is jsonbloom.com — free, runs entirely in the browser, no signup. This post is about the architecture choices behind it, because most of them turned out to be smaller decisions than I expected. Why not react-flow ...