So, I decided to create the public folder myself. looking at @grekier response. however, I don't know if this is the best practice or anti pattern.

since the Vercel team, in the PR, said To ship less files in a bootstrapped Next.js project

they decided to get rid of this directory. so you should be able to use assets folder directly inside of src or app directory. but you can't !

it is confusing to me.

please let me know, if you were able to directly access to those static assets from app directory.

for now, this is what worked for me and I won't select it as final answer.