lshw top-level element is a list, not a dictionary since Eoan

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, so I'm asking for an opinion.

As far as I see lshw behaviour has changed since eoan. I suppose it was introduced by that commit: https://github.com/lyonel/lshw/commit/135a853c. In bionic it returns JSON dict, now in Eoan/Focal it returns list:

root@bursting-satyr:~# lshw -json -quiet | head #Bionic
{
  "id" : "bursting-satyr",
  "class" : "system",
  "claimed" : true,
  "description" : "Computer",
  "width" : 64,
  "capabilities" : {
    "smp" : "Symmetric Multi-Processing",
    "vsyscall32" : "32-bit processes"
  },

root@glad-sawfly:~# lshw -json -quiet | head #Eoan, Focal
[
{
  "id" : "glad-sawfly",
  "class" : "system",
  "claimed" : true,
  "description" : "Computer",
  "width" : 64,
  "capabilities" : {
    "smp" : "Symmetric Multi-Processing",
    "vsyscall32" : "32-bit processes
So my question is: is it an unintended side-effect of the fix or long-term format change?

Thanks in advance.