I have yet to experience a client who would outright ask me to create a model essay to work with.
Clients do sometimes go out of their way to tell me that they intend to use the essay as a guide to help them write their own essays. It always seems like a transparent attempt to protect themselves or just to maintain a façade because they're embarrassed to admit (even to me, a total stranger) that they intend to use the work the way we all know they're really going to use it. Other times, they take a different approach by telling me, in great detail, about being very good students who always do their own work, but that they're dealing with major life challenges, such as diseases or tragedies in their families. I usually respond that they don't have to justify anything to me and that I'm grateful for their patronage and that I need them as much as they need me because this is how I earn a living.
The other reason that I don't think many of them use the product to help them develop as writers is that I'm often astonished at how much they're willing to pay for the simplest of rush projects, such as responses to forum posts of their classmates or basic essays for Composition I courses, such as whether they think an online education is as good as a traditional college experience, or what their most pleasant experience was. Sometimes, they even order projects consisting of writing a business letter or an email. It does happen that clients order projects to learn how to write, but incredibly rarely. One of my favorite current clients actually orders essays that aren't even assigned because he's really trying to learn how to write; and I can tell that this is true by the nature of those projects and because he also orders many projects that are assigned without any embarrassment. He's even ordered 2,000-word essays asking me to write about
how I researched and wrote his previous project, just to help him understand. Another runs two businesses and really knows his stuff, but can't afford to stay up all night writing these things instead of getting some sleep. I've also had a Harvard-trained practicing surgeon who was going to law school and (understandably) didn't have the time to write his law school projects. (This was also the first time I realized that law schools now assign much more writing than they used to: when I was in law school, the only writing I did besides one exam at the end of every course were a few projects in two Legal Writing courses and one major thesis on a topic of my choice.) However, these types of clients represent (literally) less than 1% of my clientele over the last 10 years.