I have been reading through the concurrency book and reached the end, the last article talks about an extension to URLSession and provides the following example:

extension URLSession {
    func decode<T: Decodable>(
        _ type: T.Type = T.self,
        from url: URL,
        keyDecodingStrategy: JSONDecoder.KeyDecodingStrategy = .useDefaultKeys,
        dataDecodingStrategy: JSONDecoder.DataDecodingStrategy = .deferredToData,
        dateDecodingStrategy: JSONDecoder.DateDecodingStrategy = .deferredToDate
    ) async throws  -> T {
        let (data, _) = try await data(from: url)

        let decoder = JSONDecoder()
        decoder.keyDecodingStrategy = keyDecodingStrategy
        decoder.dataDecodingStrategy = dataDecodingStrategy
        decoder.dateDecodingStrategy = dateDecodingStrategy

        let decoded = try decoder.decode(T.self, from: data)
        return decoded
    }
}

Most of this is fairly self explanatory but 1 thing I do not understand is the line:

let decoded = try decoder.decode(T.self, from: data)

Why is this line not:

let decoded = try decoder.decode(type, from: data)