E401 errors when publishing with scoped :_auth

[morleytatro]

• What are you trying to do?
  Publish a library to Nexus

• What feature or behavior is this required for?
  This is required for publishing with npm 9.x.

• How could we solve this issue? (Not knowing is okay!)
  Really unsure where the root of the issue lies, as our devops team doesn't see a way to modify how it's behaving on the server-side.

• Anything else?
  When using the following config, on publish (but not installation), we're getting E401 errors:

@figure:registry=https://nexus.figure.com/repository/npm-group/
//nexus.figure.com/:_auth=${NEXUS_NPM_TOKEN}
always-auth=true
save-exact=true

In contrast, leaving auth unscoped (which throws errors with npm 9.x), works fine:

registry=https://nexus.figure.com/repository/npm-group/
_auth=${NEXUS_NPM_TOKEN}
always-auth=true
save-exact=true