The discussion of objects in the introduction of ECMA-404, 1st Edition /
October 2013 contains:
JSON instead provides a simple notation for expressing collections of
name/value pairs. Most programming languages will have some feature for
representing such collections, which can go by names like record, struct,
dict, map, hash, or object.
However, most of these programming language features cannot represent
arbitrary collections of name/value pairs. Instead they represent something
more like a (single-valued) mapping from names to values. If JSON objects
are intended to be arbitrary collections of name-value pairs, then the list
of analogous programming language constructs should be changed.