my problem is that from any node there are two possible lines to an edgezand I’m never sure which is the correct one

X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren’t stupid

Not gonna disagree with the rest of what you said, but the Xorg devs and Wayland devs are mostly the same people

Because you can’t (easily) program gui apps to automate tasks, but combining a few terminal programs to get more complex behaviour is really easy

You could use jq, which will work no matter how the json is formatted.

Without trying it out, something like the following might work:

jq '.path.to.key.to.change |= 11' file.json > file.json.tmp && mv file.json.tmp file.json