Such a feature was a pretty bad phishing and social engineering vector, particularly when you could render html out of that folder, but even when html was dropped that there were social engineering attacks a bad actor could pull relying on the user's trust of a dropbox url. You could also guess other files in the public folder based on the url, which was a privacy concern.

Multiple years before support was dropped, shared links were added, which fix these concerns. You can set ?dl=1 to get a raw link. `curl/wget` (set to follow redirects) still get you the raw contents even if you don't set ?dl=1.