I have the same issue. In 3.x I was using Heat to harvest and had to use a XSLT transform to add the Permanent="yes" to the harvested files. But we are now being forced to target Dot.Net Framework 4.8.1 in order to support Arm64 processors and we couldn't do that in WiX 3.11 so upgraded to v5 and switched to Files because our Heat code no longer worked. In our case we ship sample data files and tutorials (all generated by non-devs) and harvest them because they change frequently and maintaining the install to drop old ones and add new ones would be a lot of work. They are installed in the Program Data folder and end users can use them and come to rely on them so removing them would be a problem. Long term users will have lots of samples that no longer ship. I don't think this is all that unusual a situation as I have seen similar at every company I've worked at. Sure, it would be possible to not ship/install any samples and force the user to download them from a website, but then they have to go looking for them whereas those that are on there system just appear in our product ready to use.