If you use Neocities or Nekoweb at all, and spend any amount of time of time in the Recently Updated sections, odds are you'll notice a lot of the sites look the same. You either have dementia, or the sites are using templates. Template based sites have sorta gotten a bad reputation, and that's fair, they're usually pretty boring, but they serve an important role in the 'Indie Web Ecosystem'.

Unfortunately, some people aren't born as perfect as me, lacking the W3Schools implant I got in a secret government facility. This means that they need to actually start somewhere, and usually, somewhere doesn't involve making a full website from scratch despite having no experience. Templates, especially simple ones like the sadgrl template, allow for people to get one foot in the door for webdesign.

Odds are, if you have a personal site, at one point, you used a template for it. Hell, even this site was based on a template for 35 minutes, before I took it down because I thought it was boring. Templates basically exist to get more people into HTML/CSS in a less daunting way, because unless you're an idiot like I was, you won't try to make a whole site after an hour.

I'd also argue that templates save us from a lot of sites that'd be even worse without a template, my first site is a testament to this. Templates pretty much teach you the fundamentals of golden ratio web-design, so you don't end up expanding your site horizontally for some reason. (like i did...) Templates are more or less the only thing saving us from even more white background sites with a single line of text saying "welcome to my site, i made this to escape social media, i'll add more soon" for 8 months straight.

Basically, despite semi-popular belief, templates aren't going to destroy the indie web as you know it, just let people use them, maybe they'll make a custom layout eventually. If they don't, yeah, my bad, you can still boil them. Besides, the whole idea behind the indie web is that you control your site, why care about what other people do? TM out.