Some people like to use the silkscreen layer as build-up documentation.
To do this you can add a silkscreen layer to all your pads; for plotting the actual silkscreen you’d check “exclude pads” and for plotting the build-up documentation you uncheck it.
It’s a conundrum. We split off Export to SVG, but now we’re getting bug reports that they don’t have the exact same feature set. I’m not sure what the answer is…
I’m not an expert KiCad user, but I’m also far from being a “newbie”. This one setting really threw me off when trying to send out quality gerbers for Fabrication.
I think this issue needs to be clarified or I won’t be the only one asking this exact same question.