No, we had that problem before and the conclusion was unanimous and generic: never remove anything from .gitignore. The reason is that the previously ignored files will eventually be committed into the repository inadvertently.

In this specific case we rely on the release script to clean things up, which is a step that also shall be retained even if technically not needed, it is a valuable safe-guard.

One thing we need to verify is how the pr-validator behaves when switching between 2.2 and 2.3 branches: the files should in principle cause test failures when going 2.2 -> 2.3 (but currently the relevant test does not run, AFAIK; we need to fix that anyway).