Publishing to npm is done via Github Actions with the .github/workflows/release.yml action which is triggered automatically whenever there's a new release created in Github.
The creation of Github releases is done with the np npm package and the --no-publish flag, so that it skips the publishing part which is going to be handled by the action mentioned above.
np --no-publishThe reason why I release with a Github action is so that I can use the --provenance feature of npm, which is only available when packages are released through a trusted CI/CD platform. Read more here