This may be a duplicate of Bug 46062. If so please close this and complete the other or vice versa. As recently discussed in the email thread created by myself "/etc/skel doesn't work?!" (dated: Mon, 06 Mar 2017 12:25:22 -0300) on freebsd-questions, appears quite clear (as pointed out by Arthur Chance) that /etc/skel has been added by Jordan Hubbard on Feb 27th 1998 with the comment: "MFC: /etc/skel doesn't seem to be used in the -current branch either, but it doesn't hurt." At present time /etc/skel has no functionality whatsoever, is a dead directory, a leftover dragged until now on the base system from an unclear intention dated almost 20 years back. It causes confusion, is useless, I believe it is the right time to delete it.
I believe this is a duplicate of Bug 46062 which I just spent a little time looking into.(In reply to ASV from comment #0) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 46062 ***
A commit references this bug: Author: eadler Date: Sun Dec 31 07:25:56 UTC 2017 New revision: 327421 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/327421 Log: mtree: remove /etc/skel We use /usr/share/skel instead of /etc/skel. The existence of /etc/skel has confused people. PR: 46062 (submitted 2002-12-07) PR: 218897 Submitted by: carl@slackerbsd.org Submitted by: asv@inhio.net Changes: head/ObsoleteFiles.inc head/etc/mtree/BSD.root.dist