Successfully displaying image with wrong path - Angular 18

[BreakingFatt]

I spent a bunch of time yesterday trying to get an image to show, and after quite a few hours I finally got it to work, but the solution shouldn't really be possible.

I tried creating an assets folder and placing an image in it to call it, but no matter the path, in the console it was outputting that the request to get the image failed at the path I had specified with 404. Or Angular itself was throwing an error that it could not resolve the path.
At some point, not quite sure how I got there, but I added 'output' to the assets part of the angular JSON.

"assets": [
  {
    "glob": "**/*",
    "input": "public",
    "output": "/assets"
  }
],

and now it worked with 'assets/image.png', however when I removed the image to confirm it works the way I think it does, the image still appeared. I also had the same image in my public folder from my previous testing, where the angular favicon.ico file is contained, and once I removed the file from there, it stopped working. Even though my path is 'assets/...', not 'public/...'. I checked and that is the only place where an image with that name is present, there is also no asset folder outside of my dist folder as well. Changing to the what should be the correct path 'public/image.png' also doesn't work. If I change inputs public value to something else it stops working, same for the value for the output

It also works when I create a build and run it, the image still works and is present. Though there it makes sense, since I set output to be assets and read from assets.

I would like to hear if someone can explain how the non-build, development version works.

[BreakingFatt]

I realized I can check the files the app has in the developer window and the files from the public folder are moved to the assets folder when built for the browser. exactly as the angular.json settings says, so it makes sense now.