Rest sensor -- Getting attributes from a specific array object?

I’m struggling with a Rest Sensor, or more its data structure that isn’t very home assistant friendly.

The json response has a leading hidden char that I’ve managed to remove, that made the struct to parse correctly.
The json object have an array, in that array I want to find a specific object by its id, this I’ve also solved.

Problem comes when I want to add more of the data (from the same level) as attributes.
I’ve tried a few things but I guess the json_attributes parse the original data and not the output from the value_template? From some googling I figured out a way that might have worked if the original data didn’t have that leading crap char but as it is now it won’t parse.

I’m not 100% sure this is the problem, but it looks like it.
Is there any way around it?

This is what I have so far (I can’t share the entire sensor due to the api not being public).

**  sensor:
    - name: "test_status"
      value_template: >
        {% set cleaned_value = value | replace('\ufeff', '') %}
        {% set lifts = cleaned_value | from_json %}
        {% set lift = lifts.lifts | selectattr('id', 'equalto', '252') | first %}
        {% if lift %}
          {{ lift.status }}
        {% else %}
          "Unknown"
        {% endif %}
      json_attributes_path: "$.lifts[?(@.id=='252')]"
      json_attributes:
        - name
        - updatedAtUtc

Here’s a subset of the (cleaned) data.

{
  "xid": "newyork",
  "lifts": [
    {
      "id": "252",
      "name": "Empire State",
      "shortName": "ES",
      "type": "building",
      "status": "active",
      "updatedAtUtc": "2025-01-07T07:11:59Z"
    }
}