You're correct in the sense that you may not find it useful to set properties like app.set('title', 'my website') on the app object (unless for some reason you reference this property elsewhere in your code, or a package you've installed expects this property to be set).
You must keep in mind however that setting other specific property names will do more than what meets the eye, and may change the way that your application behaves. For example, setting app.set('trust proxy', true) will adjust how the req.ip property is populated by providing instead the value of the x-forwared-for header of requests (which is useful if your application is behind a reverse-proxy like CloudFlare etc).
A list of these special properties per ExpressJS documentation can be found here: http://expressjs.com/en/api.html#app.set