Is this simple string considered valid JSON?

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Yes, in most contexts. It is valid JSON syntax representing a JSON value.

The confusion around this comes from Douglas Crockford’s RFC 4627, which originally defined the application/json internet media type in 2006. It said that:

A JSON text is a serialized object or array.

However, as Crockford explained in a post in 2013 (unfortunately deleted with rest of Google+, but archived here):

JSON is just a grammar, and the grammar includes numbers and strings. Uses of JSON must necessarily be more restrictive. RFC-4627 is one possible use, and was never intended to be the standard for JSON itself.

The example string is a valid JSON value, but it would have been incorrect to use it as the full “JSON text” body of an application/json HTTP response. However, that’s no longer true: RFC-4627 was obsoleted in 2014 with the publication of RFC 7159, which lets you use any JSON value:

A JSON text is a serialized value. Note that certain previous specifications of JSON constrained a JSON text to be an object or an array.

A “standard for JSON itself” was also published in 2013, as ECMA-404, and JSON was also defined in edition 5.1 of the ECMAScript (JavaScript) specification ECMA-262. These specifications and most parsers allow any JSON value as a complete JSON text, even if it’s just a simple string.

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