MySQL 5.7.12 import cannot create a JSON value from a string with CHARACTER SET 'binary'

You can apply a regex to the SQL text which you exported which will convert your binary strings into an insertable format. This was my quick and dirty fix when I faced this issue

(X'[^,\)]*')
CONVERT($1 using utf8mb4)

Applying this regex means

INSERT INTO json_table (json_column) VALUES (X'7B22666F6F223A2022626172227D');

will now become

INSERT INTO json_table (json_column) VALUES (CONVERT(X'7B22666F6F223A2022626172227D' using utf8mb4));

I had this problem dealing with exports made by Sequel Pro. I unchecked the Output BLOB fields as hex option and the problem went away. Visually inspecting the export showed legible JSON instead of binary.

I faced the same issue today. Below were the findings for my case,

I asked one of my friend to generate an SQL dump for me to import. He used sequel-pro to generate the dump (export database). When I did the import it threw an error

Cannot create a JSON value from a string with CHARACTER SET 'binary'

So, there was an issue with the generated dump, all the json fields were converted to some raw format i.e. instead of value being

"{'key1':'value1', 'key2':'value2'}"

it was,

X'nfdsklsdsklnfjkbvkjsdbvkjhdfsbvkjdsbnvljkdsbvkjhdfbvkjdfbvjkdfb'

So, when importing the dump i.e. running the insert statements mysql could not process the data as it was not of json type.

Here is a link to the bug reported
https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro/issues/2397

You need to uncheck the Output BLOB fields as hex option.