I see. Surely that means that the source files have to be structured in a certain way then. If a design for a piece of print media was flattened to a single rasterised layer, or a video project had all the effects baked into the clips, a freelancer could deliver in the right format, but that file would be much less useful than if every operation was preserved non-destructively. I would think some artists wouldn’t want to just give away how they achieve certain effects.

I don’t know if that’s much of a thing in creative fields, or if there are conventions on things like keeping text as text, not editing it as vectors or pixels.