I said, that I avoid creating defstruct only modules. If though I have related functions for some type, I do create a module and a defstruct as well. Thats it.

Also JSON doesn’t give you any guarantee about types, so why care?

Creating and maintaining depply nested structs is a burden and comes with a technical debt, when in fact all you need to rely on is the contract that there will be certain fields and you never care for the rest.

This is especially true when you have a JSON which constantly changes its shape and you need to find out the proper type first by checking a certain key in it.

If using Poison you can have it auto-convert a JSON string to a specific struct(s). You’d still need to write your structs, but once done then you have a confirmed structure.

Why do you need it to be a struct? Can’t you use a map instead?

I do usually try to avoid to create struct-only modules, so unless you do not want to create related functions, using a plain map might be so much easier.

I was looking at using guards with functions but doesn’t seem like I can use Map.get inside the guard.
I would like to create related functions as well. Can I not make related functions with structs?

You can’t access maps (structs are just sugar over maps) in a guard, but you can match on them in the function head or in a case-clause or using the match operator.

I do not understand that question.