Exclude assets in production build

Inside your angular.json there is a configurations object projects.{project-name}.architect.build.configurations.

Set the assets inside the prod entry to []

"production": {
  //...
  "assets": []
}

This is untested though, but by judging from what I know from the configuration file, this should be possible.

This will make any build and serve with the production flag to exclude the assets. If you really want all the builds, no matter the environment, to build without assets, you move the assets array from projects.{project-name}.architect.build.options to the projects.{project-name}.architect.serve.options and set the one in build to an empty array.