what even is this thing used for lol

It's a code block used to format text as is, it's usually used for code or markup so that you can write it without having it be parsed

Idk if it actually has a purpose here on FRAF because it doesn't look like you can use BBCode or HTML anyway. But to give an example if you write this <b>text</b> in HTML it becomes parsed as bolded text like text because of the <b></b>

If you wrap it in a code block, it gets written literally as <b>text</b> instead of as text