I know you said man pages are too technical but... man hier? https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/hier.7.html

       /etc/skel
              When a new user account is created, files from this
              directory are usually copied into the user's home
              directory.

Apparently "skel" is short for "skeleton", i.e. the skeleton for a new user home directory.

This is a pretty quick read with a bit of context for each entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard

(edit: similar content as man hier but with some more historical context and callouts to.other references)

One thing that's important to understand about Linux and its *NIX pedigree is its history of compromises later overcome by Moore's Law and its variants.

UNIX, its precursors, and its derivates has been around for something 50 or 55 years, essentially congealing in Bell Labs and evolving from there. It was conceived and developed when EVERYTHING about computing was expensive in both dollars, cycles and cooling. The zeitgeist of the era emphasized small, efficient operations that did one thing and did it well, reusing as Mich existing code as possible because storing anything extra was more expensive.

The filesystem itself is a study in value engineering, from economizing on the number of bytes in file paths (knowing linkers store that information in symbol tables) to optimizing system images to the most common storage media sizes of the day. The evolution of /bin, /lib, /etc, /sbin, /usr/* and even /home are just interesting reads if you're into deep lore and arcana.

Hope you have fun exploring it, its a dying body of knowledge

Not exactly what you're looking for, but for an understanding of the general directory structure in Linux, you might want to have a look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS 3.0). It defines which directories need to exist and what they are supposed to contain. Also, it's a rather light read and not awfully technical.

If you want more of a deeper dive, you might want to get a book that can be used in preparation for an LPIC-1-certification, even if you never intend to take the actual test. I found that they do a really good job at teaching not just the user perspective of Linux (type this to do that), but also the reasoning behind why Linux works the way it does.

The default files for each new user are stored in this directory. Each time a new user is added, these skeleton files are copied into their home directory. An average system would have: .alias, .bash_profile, .bashrc and .cshrc files. Other files are left up to the system administrator

https://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/etc.html

This video is useful

https://youtu.be/42iQKuQodW4

Regarding /etc/skel being an empty directory, note that it is one of the few places outside /home where you can actually expect hidden files :) On my Arch it contains Bash dotfiles, for example.

Not sure it helps with /etc/skel (never heard of it before) but this is a cool infographic: https://whimsical.com/fhs-L6iL5t8kBtCFzAQywZyP4X