I'm using Spine Editor 3.6 and it all seems to work ok, except for that one thing. It sounds like the .json file format has changed in that one regard, which would explain everything. I think the quickest fix looks like programatically setting inheritScale on all bones to be 0.
I actually tried integrating the 3.6 code with the QML plugin, and it looked like a bit of work (I thought it was 2.5 because the header in the source files states "Spine Runtimes Software License v2.5", so I guess it's the license that's 2.5 not the runtime? The zip from git file says version 3.6) I'm not sure which version of the spine-c library the QML plugin uses. At the top of the files it says "Spine Runtimes Software License Version 2.1", but is that a license version or a runtime version?
I think for now I'll stick with what I've got. But if I wanted to update the QML integration to the latest version, could I post a bunch of things I can't figure out? When I checked it out, there were around 100 compile errors, but a lot of it was repeated stuff, and some I could figure out by myself.