Why would you want to maintain extra whitespace (again outside of text strings) after a save? Any sort of JSON editor is going to have some sort of formatting function that could restore it on load.

One exmaple: implement a text editor like GitHub's gist naively.

You can try to be clever and encode the incoming data to reduce whitespace, but the business requirement is whatever user entered is what user expects to get back. Otherwise, your best bet is save the entire text.

But in that case, should you really be storing the JSON as JSON? Isn't it just a string as far as you're concerned? You're not going to be querying the user's JSON, are you?

You are correct and it depends on how you want to save your data (poor or bad!). In the article it does use log as an example. Perhaps that would be a more convincing-ish example.