node -p -e "require('./package.json').version"

cat package.json | jq -r '.version' works on github actions

Easier:
jq -r .version package.json

real	0m0,021s
user	0m0,020s
sys	0m0,000s

If someone uses image based on ubi-minimal - which doesn't have jq, grep or even sed - use this script:

VERSION=$(cat package.json | tr -d '\n' | tr -d ' ' | cut -d'"' -f4)

grep "version" package.json | ...

grep directly instead of cat?

Thanks for this thread, lots of creative workarounds and useful techniques to be learned here.

However, I think the best option, at least for the OP task, got largely overlooked here. npm show ./ version (as pointed out by @mightyiam among others).

BTW, the actual command AFAICT is npm-view, and there it says that npm has aliased v, show, and info to it.

WARNING: npm show . version and npm show ./ version are different. The . seems to pull from the published repository info (in cache?), where as the ./ actually reads the package.json in the current directory. The latter is the one we want here (at least the OP). So make sure you use npm show ./ version.

FWIW, I have added these two to my ~/.bash_profile:

alias whatver="npm v ./ version"
alias tagver="whatver | xargs git tag && git push --tags"

(I always forget how useful xargs is, until I run across a case like this where it's helpful)

If you already have node installed: node -p "require('./package.json').version"