2 things I'm seeing. One is that it is picking up the 2 under the hood git plumbing files.

The other is that it is picking up folders for a do not render topic hierarchy (shown as WIP-DO-NOT-EXPORT in the screenshot). This isn't causing any harm but I thought I'd mention because my OCD says to do that. 😃

I don't understand what you're saying here.

Yes, DM generates those two GIT support files. They have fixed content that gets generated with a new project and never changes unless you change them manually. If you change it it stays that way. What you showed in your .gitattributes is not from DM - that comes from somewhere else.

I don't understand any part of the second statement.

+++ Rick ---

Sorry if I was unclear. 😃

This specifically about the output when using the Copy to Zip file path. I think WWHB did this as well. It just sweeps up everything in the root. As I use the zip and extract approach to push my content it's just an extra step to delete the unwanted files from the zip file before extracting. No worries.

The Zip export works off the generated site.

I can't recall offhand whether the exclusion just excludes from the index and search, but puts the topics down on disk or not. I think it's the latter - the topics are not rendered at all into wwwroot but I have to check.

+++ Rick ---

It's all good. If I have to remember to delete a handful of files before I extract that's not too onerous.