Readme file is gernerally used in projects to provide an overview of the project

and how it can be utilized and it's implementation.

Generally if you ever see a new add on feature on git, people usually mention
details of project and documentation of how you can leverage that code in your org.

It contains the important features of the project. It depends upon org and
developers, that they use however they wish, to provide documentation or step-by-
step guide.

While gitignore is used for skipping certain files when we merge the files in prod.

We use it when we wish certain files not to be merged with any merge action, in
that case we specify the file path in gitignore and it takes care of it the way
to skip the file and move forward with the merge.