I can imagine that it’s mostly for convenience.
I can think of use cases including:
- downloading a single package from a monorepo
- being able to copy paste a url from GitHub for the directory you are currently viewing
Yeah as you've said, I often find myself wanting to only download a certain directory, path or package of an especially big repo that I'm currently viewing (without even cloning the entire repo at depth 1) and to do so by simply copy & pasting the GitHub URL so that's why. Probably more instances where this might come in handy ;)