I'm working on a GitLab CI/CD pipeline where we merge the develop branch into the main branch. However, we've encountered an issue where the version numbers in the package.json file are updated in the main branch during the merge, but not in the develop branch. This leads to a situation where, when merging develop into main again, the version numbers do not increment because the develop branch still holds the old version, preventing a new version from being created.

Here's the relevant part of my .gitlab-ci.yml file for publishing the NPM packages:

.publish_npm_template:
  stage: publish
  script:
    - |
      ng build @Lib/${LIBRARY_DIRECTORY} --configuration=production
      npm version patch
      npm publish to registry

publish_npm_Lib:
  extends: .publish_npm_template
  variables:
    LIBRARY_DIRECTORY: LibDIR
  rules:
    - if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "main"

How can I ensure that the version numbers are correctly updated in both branches during merges so that new versions are always generated in future pipeline runs?