“The nodes above the baked ones in the image you provided is not related to the baked maps underneath are they?”
Those Nodes are what is being Baked; what goes into the Roughness socket of the Principled Shader, is being Baked into the Roughness Image Texture and what goes into the Normal Socket is being Baked into the Normal Image Texture…
Myself, I rarely Bake Textures, to be honest…I only use Blender and do not make things that need to be exported (like for games).
I don’t know if it makes a difference in the actual Render time, but it does in the Renderer’s ‘preparation time’…The Render Engine calculates all those Nodes first and then starts Rendering vs. loading the image textures and start Rendering…With Cycles, the actual Render time is often much longer than the preparation, so it is often not a big win to Bake…
There are many good reasons to Bake, but it is not always better…
