Extracting MSI from the EXE installer

Greetings,

I am a MECM admin and application packaging/patching is part of my job duties. I happen to be assigned to package PowerBI Desktop for next month's patch cycle.

While I am not proficient at using PBD myself, I do know that PBD is no longer offered in MSI format for a while now, and it is stated as "Power BI Desktop is released only as a single .exe file, which contains all supported languages. The .msi version is no longer being released." in MS docs URL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/desktop-latest-update-archive?tabs=powerbi-desktop

So it took me by surprise when I looked at internal documentation written by previous person who handled PowerBI Desktop and historical contents in my environment, because they were using a 3rd party tool to extract MSI from the EXE installer file, without explaining why.

Now, I am a believer of 'keeping it simple' when it comes to app packaging, and while I could have asked my team lead, but my team has a habit of 'reinventing the wheels' by inventing and relying on custom procedures and scripts where it doesn't need to be, so I thought I should tread carefully and ask here first.  If there is a good reason to do that, hey, it's a learning opportunity for me.

So to rephrase, does anyone extract MSI from PBD exe installer to package and deploy on mass scale(example: MECM), and if so, why? What are the benefits of doing that over using the EXE installer as is?

Thank you in advance,

G