JSON data parsing

I’m using n8n for a while and I’m quite happy with it in general, … but there is one thing which keep biting back over and over, when I’m build workflows, and that’s routed in the fact that node.js or js typescript or whatever script is just alien to me, so whenever I have a command, or http request or other nodes returning json, and passing it to the next node, they show up as “data” or "stdout’ etc, but only as a string.
So my question is, is there any way to enforce a data to be parsed as what it is, if n8n doesn’t see it that way ?
For example I have an API which is for service which have no dedicated node, so I use the HTTP Request node, I got the API response which is pretty firmly JSON, but all I got is a json, with a data field which is a string, so I can’t address a specific key in the data itself, I tried to enforce the response format to be json instead of autodetect, but that only parsed on the first level, so I have the highest level of keys, and anything deeper is still just strings, same goes for Command nodes.
I guess this can be done with function code, I just can’t maybe there is a community module for it, but I didn’t find it, maybe there is some hidden setting I need to flip, but I don’t know about it, so here I’m asking about this, and hope that my question isn’t too special edge case.

Any chance you ca share an example of that data? Or the workflow itself and data?

Totally fine if values themselves are redacted if it’s sensitive info, but would be helpful.

From the latest example, I can’t really as even the sample data is huge ( jsoncrack crashed into it ), but it’s an OpenProject API , which has a pretty complex nested data structure so I got the “Data too large --Empty–” error when I try to access it, but for “Execute command” node I can share examples, I have a ton of it, I might have an HTTP request example too, just need to review my workflows.

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