I set these 2 settings under WordPress dashboard » Reading:

• Homepage dropdown: set to home (an empty wordpress page I created in dashboard).
• Posts page dropdown: set to blog (an empty wordpress page I created in dashboard).

Which PHP files WordPress is loading:

• Accessing http://localhost:82 loads this php file front-page.php
• Accessing http://localhost:82/blog loads this php file index.php

My question is:

In dashboard reading settings, I only chose empty pages (titled home & blog) but how on earth did WordPress link the empty pages to corresponding php files? Even though I didn’t use Template Name in the php files.

Kindly note, I read the Template Hierarchy. But I doubt it’s related to this.