Vocal track brought into podcast multitrack template sounds awful - breaths are deafening

Your first guess was correct - it's awful and you shouldn't use it for anything. If you read around the forum, you'll find that we've been saying this consistently for some time - because so many people have trouble with it.

Templates are supposed to do two things - although nobody explains the second one very often. Firstly they are there as short-cuts for setting up a scenario you use frequently, and by using them, you can save yourself a lot of uneccessary fiddling about when you start a new episode of whatever it does. Secondly, like all presets, they are there - supposedly - to give you some sort of a starting point for creating your own. That's what the Podcast one is supposed to do, and it's a miserable failure at it. The reason is that usually it's people with relatively little experience of Audition who try to use it - and it's got all sorts of really daft settings that whoever created it thinks you might want to try using, without having the slightest inkling of what they do, and how much trouble they are going to cause you. I do not see how this is helpful in the slightest, and you should mistrust any tutorial that says otherwise about that template, quite frankly.

So what should you do? Use the default blank template, and learn about what it is you need to add to that for your own purposes. Then export that as a template. Next time you open it, you'll know what's in it, and what you want to do with it. And you'll have learned something in the process of getting there. Win-win. Trebles all round!