You don't need to use clones to create views, but I recommend them. To review, a clone folder is a viewpoint set such as stories, sections, details, etc., with view settings pre-arranged so that when you make a new story, section, or detail, a new view is automatically created with the correct settings. View settings are easy to mess up and there are a lot of them, and they directly affect output. Better to set up clones in your template, and have all your views perfectly set, even for viewpoints that haven't been born yet.
Some users/managers/template makers eschew clones in favor of placing dummy sections (e.g.) and moving them around as needed. That's OK, especially if your projects are of a consistent scope that you can prepare the template for it. Our projects vary in size a lot, and I like the user-proofing aspect of clones either way.
The only thing I don't like about clones is that they always clone the entire set of viewpoints. We have two clones of the sections: one for building sections at 48 scale, and one for wall sections at 16 scale. Both clones contain all the sections, so we sort the list using the section ID. Building sections are A2 and wall sections are A3, and then in each folder the user has to mentally tune out the sections that shouldn't exist. (And the junk sections, which are never used for output, appear uselessly in both.)
Junk trimmed for brevity
I'd like to see clones that could be filtered by ID, so that only the A2 sections appear in the building sections clone, and only the A3 sections appear in the wall sections, and the junk can be avoided completely.
