If this plugin was designed for distributing “an application”, then I think it makes sense but I haven’t actually seen any example that demonstrate this. All the example/usage of this plugin I have seen so far simply shows creating an archive with some files that are automatically picked up from a path as part of the plugin’s convention (i.e. src/$distribution.name/dist) or add files from custom path. The User Guide of this plugin doesn’t really have a lot of examples.
https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/distribution_plugin.html
Do you happen to have an example on how this plugin is supposed to be used? For example, build and application and bundle it using this plugin for distribution.