I have a monorepo project and I'm migrating to npm@7. Before npm workspaces, I had to publish packages to a private feed and then consume them in my app (I didn't bother with npm link shenanigans). Not ideal, but I made do.
Then npm introduced workspaces, and now I'm trying to migrate. While resolving peer dependency conflicts, I noticed that when I made changes to any package.json files, npm install would return the same errors unless I updated package versions to something that hadn't been published yet. I wasn't expecting this kind of behavior.
So how does npm determine where to search for a package first? Does npm install download packages from the registry before looking at workspaces? Is this intentional, and if so, why?