Code section 3: why create a new clone of the repo when all he needed was to create a new branch and modify that?

Code section 5 and 6 are apparently modifying the code branch, and the pages branch, respectively, but doing so in separate local clones of the repo. I think there's a typo in code section 6, where I think he meant to start with

  cd ../die-git-die.pages

This doesn't seem like a situation where multiple local git repos are needed. What's wrong with managing both branches from one local repo?