confused by duplicated public/assets

[ThePeach]

First off, thanks for sharing this starter project. I'm trying to understand the use of the vite plugin before integrating it into my project.
I'm currently confused by the fact that the assets are currently copied over twice into the webserver:

that is: public/assets/ gets copied as _site/assets/ and as well as _site/public/assets/.

by reading other comments, there seems to be a restriction in using assets as a directory name for vite to pick up images, but not sure about the rest... any help would be greatly appreciated 🙏