Is there an interface to interact with Anki without running the application?

Do you mean read-only interaction? The .colpkg files are compressed ZIP file versions of SQLite3 databases, so after uncompressing you could use DB Browser for SQLite
to examine them.

But if you’re planning to write to those database files, you run a high risk of corrupting them. The only time that people do this, as far as I know, is if they have a hopelessly corrupted database and somehow no backups, and they attempt some kind of emergency surgery out of desperation.