Umbraco needs the /wwwroot directory to work, and it’s for more than just media.
Try this fun experiment: Publish your site to a folder on your local machine, then have a look inside the /wwwroot folder in the output.
/wwwroot is where all of ASP.NET Core’s static files are served from by default and all of Umbraco’s (many) static assets, as well as those for any packages, will get merged into the /wwwroot folder when published.
When you’re running in development mode locally, these assets get served directly from their NuGet packages - if you look in obj\Debug\net8.0\staticwebassets.build.json you can see all the static assets being referenced and where they’re coming from.