I guess you're right. That this is the expected workflow. The way the UI by default dumps Prereleases and Releases together (with very small faint font to distinguish them) in the same tab called "Releases" is an issue so I sorta understand why you feel it'd be confusing. The UI is no good, but this is not an insurmountable problem
It's true you can have a latest artifact.. I will try using that - but I can't email a colleague and tell him/her to download an artifact. There is no "latest build action artifact" page and there is so much extraneous information that if they've never used github you'd need to attach an explanation of where to click.
I didn't feel my use-case was particularly unusual, but I guess it's doesn't fit Github's model.