Why is npm version used to set the version?

[oliversalzburg]

This is mostly a question, as I'm suffering from the same issue described in #500 and I was looking into options to solve it.

So, why is npm version used to set the version in the manifest? Given the CLI arguments, it seems fair to assume that no side effects beyond changing the version field in the manifest.json is desired. Similarly, semantic-release only supports single-project-repositories, so there also shouldn't be any monorepo side effects to take into account.

Thus, why is this CLI approach used instead of just manipulating the file? It seems like npm needlessly causes problems here, because it's being used for a task where a simpler approach would be available (manipulating the manifest ourselves).

[oliversalzburg]

After looking into it a bit myself, I figure it's because npm version takes care of preserving style, line terminators and whatnot when replacing the version.