Documentation for the `latest` parameter

I have a lot of trouble understanding what the `latest` parameter actually means and what consequences it has.

My understanding of the behavior is that its goal is to control how to filter the results based on `version` and list of `distro`, and is orthogonal to other filters like OS, architectures, archive types (zip/tar.gz), package types (jdk/jre), javafx or not, etc.

But the exact behavior for each value of this parameter seems to change over time, or maybe I just misunderstood something.

Could you please precisely document what each value does in which cases (when `version` and/or `distro` are specified)? Thanks!