It would be nice to have the ability to be able to create a project using an existing template as a starting point, like from Cookiecutter, similar to how Visual Studio lets you do so. Visual Studio does amazing integration with Cookiecutter, that I'm surprised this is not brought up in lieu of these recent conversations (here and here)
Maybe this is just me, but wouldn't it make sense to build out a feature in RStudio where you can build a project from scaffolding or from a template like cookiecutter? The RStudio extensions does not really seem like the right solution for the issue at hand:
https://rstudio.github.io/rstudio-extensions/rstudio_project_templates.html