Problem

The workflow was failing with SyntaxError: Unexpected non-whitespace character after JSON at position 3 due to double-encoding of JSON output.
When using return in github-script, the output gets wrapped in extra quotes:

• Expected: {"issues":["986"],"pr":984}
• Actual: "{\"issues\":[\"986\"],\"pr\":984}"

This made JSON.parse() fail in the second step.