How does Ionic Capacitor treat packages in child app from a monorepo?

So I setup a monorepo and have a child app with the following structure:

Ionic-App

• ionic.config.json
• node_modules
• package.json
• apps
  • child-app
    • node_modules
    • ios
    • android
    • package.json

It seems to me that the correct sequence to install a capacitor package is as follows:

1. Go into child and do my install
2. Go into root rebuild node_modules (remove then npm i)
3. Go back into child and run npx cap sync
   • this seems to move the dependency from the child package.json and to the root
   • this also seems to update the podfile with the path to root
   • pod 'CapacitorApp', :path => '../../../../node_modules/@capacitor/app'

If I don't follow these exact steps the package seems to stay in the child package.json and the podfile links to the child: pod 'CapacitorApp', :path => '../../node_modules/@capacitor/app'

My question is, am I doing this right? I haven't found any docs explaining this process. If someone knows where to find that, can you please link to it?