does a new repo actually *need* default template content?

  (apologies for more pedantic nitpickery, just little things i'm
running across in my travels. aside: i actually teach git courses, so
it's a bit embarrassing that i don't know some of this stuff. *sigh*.)

  running on fully-updated fedora 28 system:

  $ git --version
  git version 2.17.0
  $

  is there anything in /usr/share/git-core/templates/ that is actually
*essential* when initializing a new repo? this is what's in my
directory by that name:

  ├── branches
  ├── description
  ├── hooks
  │   ├── applypatch-msg.sample
  │   ├── commit-msg.sample
  │   ├── fsmonitor-watchman.sample
  │   ├── post-update.sample
  │   ├── pre-applypatch.sample
  │   ├── pre-commit.sample
  │   ├── prepare-commit-msg.sample
  │   ├── pre-push.sample
  │   ├── pre-rebase.sample
  │   ├── pre-receive.sample
  │   └── update.sample
  └── info
      └── exclude

but none of that above looks critically important.

  "man gitrepository-layout" describes the "branches" directory as
"slightly deprecated", the default description file has a generic
"Unnamed repository" message but, hey, so does the git source code
repo itself, the hooks are all "commented out", and the info/exclude
file effectively has no content, so i'm guessing that nothing there
actually needs to be used to populate a new repo via "git init",
correct?

  under the circumstances, then, should it be a viable option to
initialize a new repo while specifying you want *no* initial template
content? it appears you can do that just by specifying a bogus
template directory (or even /dev/null) with "--template=", but that
generates a "warning" -- does a selection like that even merit a
"warning" if it's clear that's what i'm trying to do?

rday