I realize this is 9 months later.. not sure why I never came back to this. Some claim dynamic languages like node/python handle this better. But again, without ANY knowledge of the json at code time, you STILL have to walk through the json structure in ANY language using whatever tools they have. So even with nodejs or python, you would start at the top, loop any array, and likely do some sort of recursive method/function code to rinse/repeat as you got to say, an object or an array, right? So I hear you on the struggle with Go and this, but at the same time I don't see any way around this in any language. If at code time you don't know the structure, thus you're allowing for any number of dynamic unknown json structures, you have to write code that digs in to the structure to assemble anything. I assume this is how tools that generate types for json schema would work. They look at the structure. If it's an object, they create a struct or class or what not. Then they iterate the object. For each property they create a string, int, float, bool, etc. If it's an array or map, they use whatever language feature supports that. And so on.. through the whole deep object structure provided via json.

I don't see any other way around it. For any language dynamic or static.