The main catch is it would often be faster to use a “real” programming langage ^^, both in writing the code, and in execution time for some loop heavy examples: equivalent code that completes say in 1 second in python, completing in 1 minute in jq. Also missing a way to call native libraries, to do stuff like say “md5” (relevant) in past years advents-of-code.

That being said i like the general “pipe”, map-reduce feel of the language. Like bash one-liners It can make for very terse implementations. I like to add comments, and indentation to make it readable though.