I’ll preface this by saying I’m not a database expert; in fact far from it. With that out of the way…
My general rule of thumb: if I have to query it, I create a table for it. So, I would create a table to store the individual pieces of your JSON (ie: columns are keys). You’re storing a data format (JSON) in another data format (a table), and you need to query the JSON in an environment that has no JSON parsing (resulting in you using LIKE). LIKE is process intensive due to its nature (searching the contents of a field), and as your table grows, the database server will have to spend more time performing the LIKE query–eventually resulting in a timeout for your query.