Templates save time by eliminating the initial setup friction. You skip the browser lifecycle boilerplate and jump straight to customization. That’s the real value.
For maintenance: in a marketplace environment, templates do get updated. Publishers need to keep their templates working if they want positive reviews and repeat customers. It’s not perfect, but there’s built-in incentive to maintain them.
The bigger advantage is that templates are visual by default. You can see the workflow structure immediately. Compare that to reading through Puppeteer documentation or trying to understand someone’s custom script. The visual format makes templates reusable.
If you’re building automations regularly, templates become your personal library over time. You create once, customize as needed for different sites, and reuse. That compounds the time savings.