Everything you do to a Capacitor 243,123 project outside your editor goes through @capacitor/cli, run as npx cap <command>. Install it as a development dependency, so every developer and CI job uses the version matching @capacitor/core. The daily loop: build the web app, push it into the native projects, build and launch. Cordova 129 folds those steps into cordova build (The Build Pipeline); Capacitor keeps them separate, because android/ and ios/ are source code you own (Native Projects as Source).
The examples run a Vite-built BookNest catalog (webDir is dist) on Capacitor 8.5.2 and an Android 16 emulator, emulator-5582.