if it gets set to
contact, wouldn’t the entireinputsgroup be skipped?
Correct, that is intended. When accessing a form from the Reports tab the form doesn’t have the context to know who the form is about, so fields in the inputs section are used to ask the user to explicitly select the person (or place). When completing the form from the Contact or the Task tab the form knows who the report will be about so that whole inputs section is not displayed to the user.
Although this is mostly based on convention, there are a couple of things to note. As @diana mentioned, the Core Framework populates the source field when coming from a Contact or Task. Also, the inputs section is always saved with a report, even if the relevant condition is false.
Some additional background: Non-relevant fields used to always be saved with reports. This changed in 2.18. When this change occurred we updated the Core Framework to always save the inputs section, regardless of the relevant condition. More info can be seen in this GitHub issue: Inputs group not saved when its relevance is set to false · Issue #4875 · medic/cht-core · GitHub