What should a recommended project structure look like?

Just put the prefabrication under resources. There is no need to put pictures and audio under resources, so this problem does not exist.

Only resources that are directly loaded into resources, such as prefabs, are placed under resources.

Try to put it outside, unless you want to load it with code

Of course, it will be loaded together.

No need to. Why do you feel that you need to put it under resources? The official documentation says: If a resource doesn’t need to be dynamically loaded by a script, don’t put it in the resources folder.

It only depends on whether you need to be dynamically loaded by the script directly, or is there cc.loader.loadRes(common) in your project.