My website is a large one with lots of pages. There are several deep pages that human visitors can easily find by using on-site search. Humans and crawlers can reach these pages from the home page through links, but it would take several hops (around 5 to 6). My understanding is that internal page rank distribution requires crawlers to follow the links by hopping through. Hence, it may take a while to pass ranking signals to these pages (as they are deep). But can domain authority (as perceived by Google) help these deep pages before crawlers follow all the leading links?
P.S: Crawlers can discover the deep pages via sitemaps. They do not have to traverse the full path.