I have used it a few years back when designing a customer facing integration API, it was definitely good to be able to tell customers "here's the JSON schema, you can use these libraries to work with it, and use it to validate your requests for correctness before sending them to us". This said I felt expressing non-trivial constraints was quite verbose (things like if field X is set to 123 then fields Y and Z are mandatory, otherwise Y is not allowed, if X is set to 456 then no other field is allowed, ...) and hard to extend once written, I definitely felt the need for a "JSON schema generator" at times where I could've created a table of some sort and have it output the schema.
In another much more generic customer facing API I instead used a custom schema, as I needed to do other things that would not have been possible in it like embedding the API documentation in the schema so the front-end could display help on-the-fly and use the schema to dynamically generate forms. The advantage was also that being fully in control of the syntax I could create ways to express constraints like field X is valid only in searches, field Y is valid only in PUT/PATCH but not POST, etc. etc.
This said especially for straightforward APIs I feel JSON schemas are quite useful, being able to have a single source of truth on what your messages look like that you can share with front-end, back-end and customers is quite powerful. One thing is though that validation errors are not very user-friendly unfortunately. This was all around draft-04 time IIRC.
In another much more generic customer facing API I instead used a custom schema, as I needed to do other things that would not have been possible in it like embedding the API documentation in the schema so the front-end could display help on-the-fly and use the schema to dynamically generate forms. The advantage was also that being fully in control of the syntax I could create ways to express constraints like field X is valid only in searches, field Y is valid only in PUT/PATCH but not POST, etc. etc.
This said especially for straightforward APIs I feel JSON schemas are quite useful, being able to have a single source of truth on what your messages look like that you can share with front-end, back-end and customers is quite powerful. One thing is though that validation errors are not very user-friendly unfortunately. This was all around draft-04 time IIRC.