What's the purpose of the Metadata section in a CloudFormation Template?

Question

AWS describes the overall CloudFormation Template anatomy in this doc. It states that the Metadata section is a JSON object that provides additional information about the template.
In this doc, we can see that the only provided examples of using the Metadata section are:

• AWS::CloudFormation::Init: but it seems that the only place where it can be used is in the Resource Metadata section and not in the template Metadata section. Isn't it?
• AWS::CloudFormation::Interface
• AWS::CloudFormation::Designer

The question is can we really have an arbitrary JSON in the Template Metadata section? And if so, what can be its purpose?

Note: The question is not about the Resource Metadata but the Template Metadata section.

Answer 1

The cloud-formation designer UI uses AWS::CloudFormation::Designer in this area to store additional presentation data.

Other third party tools that generate and modify templates could use template metadata to store additional information and/or state.