Why does S3 Inventory service create "inventory/data/" key?

We have an S3 bucket that uses S3 Inventory to store records of all keys in the bucket, and the inventory files are stored on the bucket itself (as opposed to a different bucket) under the prefix inventory/ — i.e., manifests are stored at keys like inventory/2024-12-19T01-00Z/manifest.json, and the inventory list files are stored at keys like inventory/data/$UUID.csv.gz.

We recently discovered that there exists an inventory/data/ key (with a trailing slash) on our bucket, presumably created by the S3 Inventory service. This abnormal key creates problems for our backup process. Why did S3 Inventory create this key? Can we safely get rid of it?