I’ve forked a couple projects that I just wanted a copy of in case the upstream is deleted.

They might not have always been empty. Could be that there was a branch for a PR that got merged, so the branch was deleted.

I fork the version I deploy in prod across multiple machines. I find it makes my life easier and I never need to learn any cli other than git clone and git pull.

If it’s licensed well then it means the user has a backup of the project if it ever gets removed or they change the license. I don’t know if that’s the actual reason though, just a guess

In my case, it's a TODO list. But often, life gets in between and I forget.

Tbf forks should be separated in the repo view on GitHub from repos you've created