Hi Shawn, I will try to explain that.
He made the scale in the Mapping Node 4.0, so that the Values of the UV go from 0 to 4. By following that with a Fraction node. those values go from 0 to (almost) 1 four times, to show the tiling of the texture.
Later he has sine and cosine in there and they already make the values repeat (although there is no longer tiling!), if that makes sense. He didn’t remove it as soon it was no longer needed, but later when he noticed it was still there…
He has a series of procedural shader tutorials (I gave the link to that playlist) full of tricks. In some the math gets quite complicated, but it’s fun to watch, if you’re into it;)