How to properly use artifacts? Sparse documentation

[nyoma-diamond]

Hello,

Upon playing with vcpkg new and the resulting vcpkg-configuration.json files, I got curious regarding the automatically included artifact registry and its intended usage. I have a moderate understanding of the intent (I believe to control for build environments, correct?), but from what I can tell documentation on how to properly use it is very sparse or outdated.

Is this still a maintained feature? If so, how is it intended to be used given that the "requires" option of vcpkg-configuration.json and artifact option of vcpkg add (as mentioned in https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/vcpkg-artifacts/) aren't mentioned in either of their respective articles (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcpkg/reference/vcpkg-configuration-json and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcpkg/commands/add).

Information regarding this functionality is very scattered and it's very unclear whether this is something that's still being supported/worked on and what/where the most up-to-date information and resources on it are. The vcpkg-ce-catalog repo is still live, though it hasn't been pushed to in a year, but the repo for the vcpkg-ce utility has been archived since 2022. Simultaneously, there's mention of vcpkg-artifacts in the vcpkg-tool repo but it's unclear how this ties in.

Also, if this feature is experimental, why is it included by default in vcpkg-configuration.json when using vcpkg new, (particularly given how borderline nonexistent its documentation is)?