Basically, the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having, and would have wondered at it all. It would have certainly been also 'a new experience' for them! Except back then they didn't have a place like reddit to go to and wonder out loud.
I never went to parties in high school, but based on my experience going to parties in college and as an adult, I imagine your individual experience at the parties would be very different depending on your social groups, social skills, and so on.
Although even as a non-participant, witnessing a party first-hand would be more informative than the filtered version you get from Hollywood.
There's also nothing stopping you from serializing unstructured data using an array of key/value structs, with a union for the value to allow for different value types (int/float/string/object/etc), although it probably wouldn't be as efficient as something like CBOR for that purpose. It could make sense if most of the data is well-defined but you want to add additional properties/metadata.
Many languages take unstructured data like JSON and parse them into a strongly-typed class (throwing validation errors if it doesn't map correctly) anyways, so having a predefined schema is not entirely a bad thing. It does make you think a bit harder about backwards-compatibility and versioning. It also probably works better when you own the code for both the sender and receiver, rather than for a format that anyone can use.
Finally, maybe not a practical thing and something that I've never seen used in practice: in theory you could send a copy of the schema definition as a preamble to the data. If you're sending 10000 records and they all have the same fields in the same order, why waste bits/bytes tagging the key name and type for every record, when you could send a header describing the struct layout. Or if it's a large schema, you could request it from the server on demand, using an id/version/hash to check if you already have it.
In practice though, 1) you probably need to map the unknown/foreign schema into your own objects anyways, and 2) most people would just zlib compress the stream to get rid of repeated key names and call it a day. But the optimizer in me says why burn all those CPU cycles decompressing and decoding the same field names over and over. CBOR could have easily added optional support for a dictionary of key strings to the header, for applications where the keys are known ahead of time, for example. (My guess is that they didn't because it would be harder for extremely-resource-constrained microcontrollers to implement).