It is a weird way to write it, I never use this notation for myself.

When teaching though, I'd rather make the it more visually explicit that jq commands are a sequence of filters. With the former notation, a | explicitly tells the reader that it's the end of one filter and the start of a new one, the latter is more implicit.

That's possible! I've never had to teach it, good point.

When I first started using jq, all of the examples I was following used the short-form. It took me a while to figure out how to use the functions and do some advanced transforms because of this. Since this article is Part 1 of a series I suspect the author will cover this in a later article.

From a teaching perspective it is probably best to start with the long-form.

good point, I hadn't considered that idea.