Will npm try to avoid installing a deprecated package version?

I tested and confirmed that it does indeed ignore deprecated versions if there is another version it can use. (I temporarily deprecated metal-name version 1.3.1 and then ran npm install metal-name@1. It installed version 1.3.0 instead of 1.3.1. When I removed the deprecation for version 1.3.1, it went back to installing 1.3.1 when I ran npm install metal-name@1.

I can not find this behavior mentioned in the npm CLI documentation. However, I can find it mentioned in the commit log for the npm CLI client.

npm uses npm-pick-manifest to determine what to install. The README for that module says:

Prefers non-deprecated versions to deprecated versions.