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The biggest benefit will probably be for new programmers following a tutorial that provides a template. The word "clone" means nothing to them. They just want to copy and build off of this project on their own GitHub.

Yes, it does sacrifice some learning about git, but once you get someone hooked on programming they will be able to learn the tools later.

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I don't get it either, is it literally the same thing a a a clone with a different name?

No, this does not preserve the history of the repo, just gives a single commit with the existing files. You might also think of this as cloning, then squashing down the entire history (well, everything in master anyways) to a single (root) commit.

Maybe I remember incorrectly, but I thought the template came from the default branch?

Oh I get it now, thanks!

Templates are a copy of a non empty word document

Cloning is a word document with versions turned on that copied all the previous versioning information

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