What is the purpose of maven-assembly-plugin inside of ui.frontend?

Platform and Version

archetypeVersion=27

Reproduce Scenario (including but not limited to)

Generate project from the latest adobe archetype e.g.: mvn -B archetype:generate -D archetypeGroupId=com.adobe.aem -D archetypeArtifactId=aem-project-archetype -D archetypeVersion=27 -D aemVersion=6.5.7 -D appTitle='my app' -D appId=platform -D groupId=com.my.app -D includeExamples=n

Actual Behaviour

The pom.xml file for ui.frontent module contains maven-assembly-plugin configuration. The plugin during maven build generates a zip package from the dist directory which doesn't really make sense as the dist folder is not even processed by aem-clientlib-generator yet.

Expected Behaviour

What is the purpose of the package/maven-assembly-plugin ?

IIRC Maven complained when performing a release with modules that did not generate build artifacts. This was an easy fix and leaves some breadcrumbs as to what is going into the ui.apps directory.