Hi @billystonka,
Let me start answering your question with another question: trusted by whom and trusted for what purpose?
Trust is an individual matter, it depends on your circumstances and goals. I certainly know and trust people that you neither know or trust. You probably know someone you’d trust to keep your lunch for you until noon, but not your unlocked phone. Does this make sense?
As you correctly quote from the documentation, the community templates are maintained by community members, and the Qubes OS team doesn’t test them. That means that you can trust those templates if you trust the community members that maintain them. No-one can make that decision for you, and the fact that you trust the Qubes OS team doesn’t make it safe to assume that you trust “these other people”.
So why are those templates in the Qubes OS ISO in the first place?
Some community templates are made available to you in the Qubes OS ISO for convenience, but they are not installed by default. You must decide if you trust them before installing and using them.
As with any trust, there can be nuance: you may, for example, trust qubes based on a community template for your “news reading” activities but not “banking”. It is up to you to evaluate what you’re protecting, from whom, how much convenience you’re ready to give up in order to protect it and what would be the consequences if you trusted the wrong people.
That process is sometimes referred to as security planning or more often as threat modelling. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) publishes a guide that you may find useful to get started:
Does this start answering your question? 