Hello,
yes and no.
Aikau still needs templating but as you point out, the role of server-side FreeMarker templating is really limited to rendering the widgets / JSON model. But the individual widgets typically have HTML template fragments associated with them, so in a sense you still have to use templating when you implement new types of widgets. Some knowledge of FreeMarker might be required if you can't work witht the default full / hybrid page templates and might want to create your own (i.e. in my current project, we use a custom variant of the Aikau / Share full page template).
Regards
Axel
