The templates basically assume that the clone URL of each repo follows the same format i.e. it uses the host string, maybe some other fixed string, and the name of the repo, to generate the clone URL. This isn't flexible at all, and is only one example usage of passing arbitrary metadata.
Another example would be a way to specify a repo description in a way that doesn't require the non-git tracked .git/description file to be present. Instead, you can commit the description into your blog git repo (i.e. in the gitja config).
I'm sure there are other use cases.