ClickHouse Native JSON Support in 2026: A PR-by-PR Analysis

TL;DR ClickHouse has full native JSON support, and has since v25.3. The JSON type stores each path as a separate columnar subcolumn with native type preservation, primary key indexing, and selective path reads. It is 2,500x faster than MongoDB for aggregations on the JSONBench 1-billion-document benchmark. The narrative that "ClickHouse can't do JSON" is outdated by two years and 80+ merged PRs. We analyzed 80+ GitHub pull requests, official ClickHouse changelogs, release blogs, and third-party