The easiest way I have found to do this is to just use require and the path to your JSON file.

For example, suppose you have the following JSON file.

test.json

{
  "firstName": "Joe",
  "lastName": "Smith"
}

You can then easily load this in your node.js application using require

var config = require('./test.json');
console.log(config.firstName + ' ' + config.lastName);

Use NodeJS File System https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v14.x/docs/api/fs.html.

Here I have used writeFileSync API to write to file and readFileSync to read from file. Also, when writing don't forget to JSON.stringify(data) because you are writing the data to a JSON file.

const fs = require("fs");
const path = require("path");

// Write Data
const data = {
"punishments": {
    "users": {
      "<example user who has a punishment history>": {
        "punishment-1567346": {
          "punishment-id": "1567346",
          "punishment-type": "mute",
          "punishment-reason": "<reason>"
        },
        "punishment-1567347": {
          "punishment-id": "1567347",
          "punishment-type": "ban",
          "punishment-reason": "<reason>"
        }
      }
    }
  }
};

fs.writeFileSync(path.join(__dirname, "outputfilepath", "outputfile.json"), JSON.stringify(data), "utf8");

// Read data
const rData = fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, "outputfilepath", "outputfile.json"), "utf8");
const jsonData = JSON.parse(rData);

Here is the working example, https://repl.it/repls/OutrageousInbornBruteforceprogramming#index.js

For ES6/ES2015 you can import directly like:

// example.json
{
    "name": "testing"
}


// ES6/ES2015
// app.js
import * as data from './example.json';
const {name} = data;
console.log(name); // output 'testing'

If you use Typescript, you may declare json module like:

// tying.d.ts
declare module "*.json" {
    const value: any;
    export default value;
}

Since Typescript 2.9+ you can add --resolveJsonModule compilerOptions in tsconfig.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es5",
     ...
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
     ...
  },
  ...
}