Ask Douglas Crockford. I did not find my source on his apprehension of his name.

What id did find: He states that he did plan for JSON to be a JavaScript subset, which contradicts his later finding, for which I have only me memory as a source, that JSON is not in some sense JavaScript.

More on topic, I did find a source that it was never meant to be human-readable in the sense of usable for documentation, but a machine-communication language, therefore comments were removed from the initial draft to avoid having non-standard meanings put in the freedom comments allow (think pre-process directives etc.).

JSON is not a strict subset of JS in that `true` is valid JSON, but not a valid JS program. Might be considered a nitpick but in a thread about semantics it's worth noting

Not all JSON is syntactically valid javascript.