What schema markup does
Schema markup is a block of structured data that tells a search engine what the things on a page are: this string is a price, this one is a brand, this number is a rating out of five. Without it a crawler is reading a layout and inferring.
JSON-LD is the format to use. It sits in a script tag in the head, it is separate from the visible markup, and it does not break when someone redesigns the template.
What it earns is eligibility for richer results and a clearer link between your pages and the entity behind them. What it is not is a ranking factor on its own, and any tool implying otherwise is selling something.