My friction seems to stem from being used to Bike (1.x) acting like a text editor. Block-based apps such as Craft, Roam, Logseq, Capacities etc all require some kind of action to put the caret into the document before you can write, and I don’t seem to mind. OTOH, I can’t recall a file-based editor that requires an action after new doc before you can write.
I think I agree with you on cleanliness and true representation, but not sure about the UX. I’m biased, I prefer the current implementation of one empty row as a starting point over this:
