Alan Kay (and his teammates during the STEPS project at VPRI) spent years and years thinking/experimenting with this, here's the final report from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325
"The big breakthrough is making it easy to create new DSLs for any situation."
The template system is somewhat like the type system in that it provides you guarantees. The templates cannot mutate any data or pull anything in that you didn't provide to it. You can be 100% sure that no one did a cute little temporary hack modifying the data inside the template somewhere, pulled in some external data real quick on a friday afternoon or did anything else that doesn't belong in the template. That's the advantage over just using a regular programming language.