Convolutional autoencoder - why keras example is asymmetry model?

Question

I'm looking on keras convolutional autoencoder example, and confused with the model structure:

import keras
from keras import layers

input_img = keras.Input(shape=(28, 28, 1))

x = layers.Conv2D(16, (3, 3), activation='relu', padding='same')(input_img)
x = layers.MaxPooling2D((2, 2), padding='same')(x)
x = layers.Conv2D(8, (3, 3), activation='relu', padding='same')(x)
x = layers.MaxPooling2D((2, 2), padding='same')(x)
x = layers.Conv2D(8, (3, 3), activation='relu', padding='same')(x)
encoded = layers.MaxPooling2D((2, 2), padding='same')(x)

# at this point the representation is (4, 4, 8) i.e. 128-dimensional

x = layers.Conv2D(8, (3, 3), activation='relu', padding='same')(encoded)
x = layers.UpSampling2D((2, 2))(x)
x = layers.Conv2D(8, (3, 3), activation='relu', padding='same')(x)
x = layers.UpSampling2D((2, 2))(x)
x = layers.Conv2D(16, (3, 3), activation='relu')(x)
x = layers.UpSampling2D((2, 2))(x)
decoded = layers.Conv2D(1, (3, 3), activation='sigmoid', padding='same')(x)

autoencoder = keras.Model(input_img, decoded)
autoencoder.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='binary_crossentropy')

The last layer of the encoder contains MaxPooling2D layer and the first layer of the decoder starts with Conv2D layer.

1. Why it is not symmetry ? I assumed that if the last layer of the encoder is down sample layer that the first layer of the decoder will be up-sampling layer.

2. What is the advantage of building the model as keras publish (instead of using up-sampling as first layer of the decoder) ?

3. Is there a reason that some layers contains padding and other not ? (Is it because we want to get to same output size as the input size) ?