Why make the player a prefab?

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I was reading the Unity manual on prefabs (Unity - Manual: Prefabs), and it said that “The player’s main character - the player prefab might be placed at the starting point on each level (separate Scenes) of your game”. Why make the player a prefab? I know prefabs can be used to make an editable copy of something, so why use it for the player? I googled this and came up with nothing. Could I get an explanation on why this would be helpful?

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(1) You can use Prefabs as a simple way to focus your attention to a specific piece of the overall game. The player character may have dozens of little elements glued onto it, like Cinemachine virtual cameras or handgrip location markers or IK knobs or specific outfit layers. Working on those in the editor separately lets you ignore the levels. Great to split things out for team development, too.

(2) The same player character may be used in multiple scenes. Edit in one place, all the scenes which use that same player character get the benefit of any updates, tweaks, adjustments. Load it into the dressing room scene, the intro scene, the game level 1 scene, the game level 2 scene, etc.

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It’ll be hard to accomplish this part…

…Without making it a prefab.

You’d need to manually re-create/re-configure the player GameObject for every scene you add it to otherwise.

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Ah, I see. Thank you!