I noticed this yesterday, I was digging around my uSD after I tried to use the Raspberry Pi Imager to pre-customise a flash for a Pi Zero 2W and it failed at everything including setting up the user, enabling SSH, adding my key, setting the hostname, and connecting to WiFi.

I was trying to avoid having to dig out the correct type of HDMI cable and the OTG adapter to plug in a Keyboard, and removing the Pi from the housing that doesn't allow plugging in anything, all in vain because the imager failed completely, not sure what that's all about.

It did allow me to notice the cloud-init and metadata files there though, I didn't realise cloud-init was new in Raspbian until seeing this post just now.