It's not always for projects that you're actively working on--I've done it a lot for projects that I have never previously touched and wouldn't otherwise go to the trouble of cloning just for a small tweak, like a random open source project with a typo somewhere.

I don't think it's at all related to the editor I use (I use vim anyway so I don't think that's the issue).

Maybe it's worth considering that others prefer different workflows than you or have different use cases?