In reference to https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/8senm4/convert_json_response_into_objects/
I have to do a lot of this stuff for work consuming ADT messages from EMR's, there's really no way of getting around having to document the shape of the json you are expecting, but there are strategies for making it more pleasant/bullet proof.
There's marshmallow(https://marshmallow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) which allows you to declare classes to serialize your json or portions of the json into concrete objects, with the added bonus of reliable type conversion and validation(which is needed more often than not).