Existence of 6.1.7 that is allowed by Composer when using 10.5, but not Drupal causes problems

Problem/motivation

This can be resolved by upgrading to the 7.x release or even <=6.1.6, but I want to flag this in case someone else runs into it as it was NOT entirely clear to me what was happening until I dug into it.

The issue is the inconsistency in the versions in the composer.json and info.yml in the 6.1.7. While that has been fixed in the 6.1.8 release, it is still a problem.

We run automated testing of every PR against both our Upstream and theme package that includes a drush si duore -y step. We include Linkit with 6.1^. Our tests that passed ~3 weeks ago started failing. The `composer install` step works with https://git.drupalcode.org/project/linkit/-/blob/6.1.x/composer.json?ref..., but the resulting versions in what ends up in the linkit.info.yml of the build will no longer install... at least when LinkIt is a dependency of the install profile. I'm guessing if LinkIt is already enabled you don't see this

If I pin the build to a specific version of Drupal code that meets the core_version_requirement: '>=10.1 <10.5.0' requirement like composer require drupal/core-recommended:10.4.0 drupal/core-composer-scaffold:10.4.0 drupal/core-project-message:10.4.0 --update-with-all-dependencies, everything worked.

When I let Composer install the version of core that is 10^, I noticed that Composer is NOT installing the 6.1.8 release. It is installing 6.1.7.

That is because the 6.1.7 release does NOT have the version range limits in composer.json from https://git.drupalcode.org/project/linkit/-/commit/f80304d06e5cd6a83135d....

Because 6.1.7 DOES have the version range limits in the info.yml, Drupal will NOT install a profile with the 6.1.7 version. Even though 6.1.8 is the supported version, Composer still finds that 6.1.7 meets both the requirements of 10^ and 6.1^ and uses that.

I'm not sure how difficult it is to remove or suppress a release from Drupal's https://packages.drupal.org/8 endpoint after it is created, but as long as Drupal thinks there is a version of the 6.1.x branch that is compatible with 10.5.x, Composer will continue to find and include that version.

Maybe including a note on the project page about the 6.1.7 release would be enough to avoid anyone else having to dig into this.