Why WordPress choose data serialization over json_encode?

I think, not 100% sure that this was the real reason the WP developers took this approach, but common sense tells me that serialize preserves the variable types and have a mini built in error detection, and json stores only string values { key : value }, so when you go back to PHP you will have to guess the format, or make a parser for it. This will force you to have two different ways to handle your data: previous, to storing the data as json and after decoding the json it will come back as a totally different object.

This is the main reason the difference in size, PHP is storing not only an array; it is storing how many elements were in the array when it was serialized, their types, and their values.

You are not storing only key value pairs on the database but you may also be storing an object with different variable types.

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