Create /public folder in a theme

Understood! Yes I haven't thought of an implementation that has view files in addition to assets. You could embed your assets inline as views, but that wouldn't work for images (unless you wanted to base64 them on-the-fly, probably not a great solution). Maybe also check out what @lonnieezell is doing here:
https://github.com/lonnieezell/myth-forums

He has themes in the root with a webpack definition to publish them out to public/.