Realsense LiDAR - What exactly does the infrared stream depict and what is it's exploitation value?

I have just purchased a RealSense L515 camera, and I have noticed that an infrared stream is also depicted in the viewer. At first, I got excited, since I thought that apart from visible range, the camera also captures wavelengths in the NIR (even though I didn't spot such capability when purchasing), and then I saw that even thought it does, it is actually not. In fact, L515 uses Laser-scanning to construct the 3D cloud, by using pulses of laser at 860 nm, and receives the infrared reflections, and times the delay between transmission and reception (Time of Flight). Reception is done by a MEMS Mirror optical board, and in contrast to hyper-spectral sensors, this sensor processes the receiving light of the same wavelength-range - that is around 860nm.

Therefore, after reading the official datasheet, it is mentioned that the IR stream represents the intensity of the reflected IR laser reflected off the objects in the scene.

Personal assumption

It is reasonable to assume that depending on the material of each surface that exists within the captured environment (reflection may be strained by object's texture or color that drastically affects the reflection coefficient property of the corresponding surface) , the intensity of the transmitted IR pulse is affected when reflecting, so supposing that this is what IR stream actually depicts, what is it useful for? Is it for providing a certainty value of the corresponding pixel's depth information (i.e. low intensity pixel => low reflectance => poor depth quality)? Another thought is that, if it is simply used for clustering objects with different texture for assisting depth estimation, why is it provided anyway?

Any type of input would be much appreciated!