Drupal emptied .htaccess file after installation

I just finished installation of Druapl on my production server. Drupal reported that the server did NOT support clean url feature.

When I was investigating into this issue, I was surprised to see that .htaccess file was empty. Although I really did not checked out whether that file existed before installation began, but what I did was to upload the zip file itself to the web server, and then extract it in the public_html folder using the cPanel's built-in file manager.

To be sure, I again extracted the same zip to a different folder, and .htaccess was there as it accompnies the installation.

So, is it normal for Drupal to empty out this important file after installation??

Also, to enable clean urls, I copied the following from the original .htaccess to the empty one:
# Various rewrite rules.

RewriteEngine on

# If your site can be accessed both with and without the 'www.' prefix, you
# can use one of the following settings to redirect users to your preferred
# URL, either WITH or WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix. Choose ONLY one option:
#
# To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
# (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
#
# To redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix,
# (http://www.example.com/... will be redirected to http://example.com/...)
# uncomment and adapt the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

# Modify the RewriteBase if you are using Drupal in a subdirectory or in a
# VirtualDocumentRoot and the rewrite rules are not working properly.
# For example if your site is at http://example.com/drupal uncomment and
# modify the following line:
# RewriteBase /drupal
#
# If your site is running in a VirtualDocumentRoot at http://example.com/,
# uncomment the following line:
# RewriteBase /

# Rewrite URLs of the form 'x' to the form 'index.php?q=x'.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

And clean urls work now. Is it advisable to restore the entire .htaccess to what accompanies the downloaded zip file??