Its a generational thing. Programmers grown up on JavaScript will prefer JSON. Its not a unique phenomenon. My guess is the noSQL was born out of fact that many young programmers simply don't know how to write SQL, if they don't know/want to use SQL and rely on ORM mapping alone, then they can as well do away with SQL databases too.
> Its a generational thing. Programmers grown up on JavaScript will prefer JSON
Not really, JSON is a simpler format with better parsing built-in for most languages. It is easier to use for programmers and performs better across the network.
The idea behind doing away with the SQL database is to remove the leaky abstraction of an ORM, by making the object model the true shape of the data and not a wrapper over SQL.