JSON Issues with Webhooks

I have been trying to overcome this issue for a day and cannot seem to find an appropriate way to make this work. I have a Trigger that has only one Action which calls a Notify active webhook. This is what the very simplified json looks like:

I am copy/pasting the placeholders directly from the list of available placeholders as shown. This is showing that I have an error on the "id" line which appears to be because I am not passing a "string" as the value. If I put double quotes around the "{{Placeholder}}", this will work. The same issue happens with the "external_id" key/value pair because in my example the value would result in a null but because I am not placing double quotes around the "{{placeholder}}" which would result in the string "null" and not a null value.

I can go to the webhooks section of the Admin area and run a custom test as shown here:

All of the values here are manually placed, since this cannot pickup ticket placeholders, and this works just fine with an integer and a null value.

Am I missing some simple element to allow me to pass non-string values in my json data? I am hoping that I do not have to pass strings and go to the effort of evaluating and converting on the receiving side of this monster.

You valued assistance is much appreciated.
-greg