need to activate generatepress before child theme otherwise child renders blank

I install WordPress via a bash script using WP CLI and I noticed that if I activate a child theme of generatepress (for example the blank starter child theme found here https://docs.generatepress.com/article/using-child-theme/) without first activating generatepress itself, the home url shows a blank page.

To see whether this happens with other themes I created a child theme of twentytwentythree (style.css has Template: twentytwentythree) and activated it without activating its parent, and it rendered the home page using the parent theme as expected.

For now I just activate generatepress and then activate its child theme, but I was wondering why this is necessary (assuming this is reproducible)?