And, if you want to bump minor or major version, simply do it in your package.json and the hooks will properly read and process it. Even updating the readme. And a new tag will be created.
I didn't know about npm version but this is one step too much for me. I want to update the patch version at each comimt.
This may not be optimal for js because it was originally meant to be a C++ thing. I just ported it to js.