Accessing Arrays Inside VARIANT Columns in Apache Doris

[eqrvivek]

I have a use case involving a VARIANT column that stores JSON with arrays of objects. For example:
{
"company": "Tech Innovations Inc.",
"departments": [
{
"name": "R&D",
"head": "Alice Johnson",
"employees": [
{"name": "John Doe", "position": "Engineer", "experience": 5},
{"name": "Jane Smith", "position": "Research Scientist", "experience": 7}
]
},
{
"name": "Marketing",
"head": "Michael Brown",
"employees": [
{"name": "Chris Lee", "position": "Marketing Specialist", "experience": 3},
{"name": "Sara Connor", "position": "Brand Manager", "experience": 6}
]
}
]
}

I want to query the first element of the departments array (or access array elements in general) directly, like I would in a normal ARRAY column: SELECT deptVariant['departments'][0] FROM dept_demo;
Problems:

1. dot notation returns NULL.
2. Casting to ARRAY fails.
3. Casting to json and then try accessing the element of the array also returns null.

I have used below queries but all return null ::

1. select json_extract(deptVariant['departments'], '$[0]') from dept_demo;
2. SELECT deptVariant['departments'][0] FROM dept_demo;
3. select json_extract(cast(deptVariant['departments'] AS JSON), '$[0]') from dept_demo;

Is it possible in to access or flatten arrays inside VARIANT columns, or do I have to store them as typed ARRAY columns instead?