I am setting up a new Drupal application, I want to set up automated tests and other developer tools, I'm running ddev, so the Drupal documentation recommends installing the ddev add-on ddev-drupal-contrib. Seems fine.

Now, once that's done, it has created a symbolic link from the project root into web/modules/custom/[my-application]/. Although this symbolic link has paths that are invalid to the host filesystem, they appear to resolve correctly from within the container.

Link to the GitHub page for this module

It's not clear to me what this is useful for. I would be inclined to just disable this feature, but it seems like there is no way to disable this. There is a provided configuration option to change the path that it writes to, but not to disable it entirely.

Can someone help me understand whatever it is I'm missing? Why is this a part of the ddev-drupal-contrib module? why is it mandatory? What can it be used for?