Not quite that, but ramda-cli[1] which I've created solves this problem, at least for me, by offering the familiar set of functions from Ramda, and you can create pipelines with those to do operations on your data.

[1]: https://github.com/raine/ramda-cli

I've used trentm's json (formerly known as jsontool) package from npm as my default tool for command-line manipulation of JSON for many years now. It provides CLI arguments for passing JavaScript code for filtering and executing on input. I have resisted investing the time into becoming fluent in jq because I've found that many of the common use cases I have are readily handled by jsontool.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/json

Edit: added more information

A few of the tools listed here seem to work like that, or roughly similar: https://ilya-sher.org/2018/04/10/list-of-json-tools-for-comm...

I didn't check any of them out though.

My hope was to one day add JS eval support to https://github.com/SuperpowersCorp/refactorio but as you can tell by the timestamps I haven't found any time to work on it in the last 4 years.

That's a really interesting suggestion, similar to how AWK uses $0, $1 etc.