JSON’s closing brace is an artificial synchronization point. Nothing in inference requires it. It accumulated as a default, unexamined, the same way the page reload and the synchronous render did before it. The entire downstream system — parser, validator, dispatcher — blocks on a character that carries no information beyond “the object is complete.” The completeness of the object was never the interesting event. The interesting events were the individual facts inside it.
(Every paradigm shift removes a synchronization point · Token streaming is cosmetic · The fundamental unit of LLM output is a fact, not an object)