Does the cover / feature / thumb image have to be in a page bundle?

[venteto]

Am I not allowed to go into an article's frontmatter and use alternate image file locations such as:

# static directory
 cover: '/images-reuse/xyz.jpg'

or:

# offsite
 cover: 'https://mycdn.net/static/images-reuse/xyz.jpg'

I don't actually have any need to use a different cover image for each article, and I don't care about resizing the images either, I just want to reuse a generic one for every article, since some image must be present in order for Facebook to even generate a link preview that even displays something as basic as the article's title. Other than that I wouldn't be using images in articles at all.

In an ideal scenario I would go into the site configuration parameters and just set this one time, e.g.,:

genericReusableCoverImage: '/images-reuse/xyz.jpg'
# optionally an assets/ variant if people still wanted to resize a generic reusable image

As a comparison, if you posted a link to this GitHub discussion on Facebook, a usable bare minimum preview (with page title, which is the most important part, to me) will be generated. But if you post a link to a post on a Congo site not using a cover or feature image, Facebook won't even render the post title. And I'm not explicitly adding or setting any cover image for this GitHub discussion, so ostensibly there is some default value for any discussion:

[tomy0000000]

I'm trying the same thing lately, and unfortunately, it seems like so. My current approach involves overriding single.html on my own site and eliminating the use of picture.html.

I can help implement this if @jpanther would like to see this in congo.