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

Question

TLDR: Since RS L515 is not a multi-spectral camera, what is the reason of providing an infrared stream, and what can it be used for?

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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 feature in the specs when purchasing), and then I saw that even thought it does, it is actually not (see Note 1). 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.

Basic background

L515 accomplishes Laser-scanning by using pulses of laser at 860 nm, and receives the infrared reflections (see Note 1) to construct the 3D cloud, according to the timed delay between transmission and reception (see Time of Flight).

Personal assumption

It is reasonable to assume that depending on the material of each surface that exists within the captured environment (see Note 2), the intensity of the transmitted IR pulse is affected upon reflection, 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 assumption is that, if it is simply used for clustering objects with different texture for assisting depth estimation, why is it provided as a separate stream anyway?

Is there anyone that could shed some light on it?

Notes

(1) (update) As for the reflected light, it uses a MEMS Mirror optical board for capturing. In contrast to hyper-spectral sensors, this sensor processes the receiving light of the same wavelength-range - that is around 860nm.
(2) in fact depending on the reflection coefficient of an object's surface which may be strained by it's texture or color