With the advent of the awesome jsonb data type in Postgres 9.4, pretty much all of the json-related functions have a json_* and jsonb_* varient. All those, except row_to_json. I spent a bit of time but couldn’t find an answer online, in the end after a bit of experimentation, I discovered that in Postgres 9.5 at least the to_jsonb function does exactly the same, like:

SELECT to_jsonb(table.*)
FROM table