The only thing I have found templates useful for was to get ideas for fields and dashboards when building something when I didn't have existing subject matter knowledge.
The few times when I considered starting with a template for a production project, I found that the template would need so much changing that I was better off starting from scratch. I was better off building only what I needed than using a template and ripping out what didn't apply. I saw projects where other people started with a template that had stuff they didn't need and a few months or years later they didn't understand their bases and didn't know what was important and was just leftover stuff.
Back when I was first learning Airtable there were far fewer templates and they were fairly basic. If I hadn't already understood relational design, I think they would have been good for learning about relational design and how linked relationships worked.
