That's exactly right. There are definitely nodejs docx templating packages (I've worked on codebases that used them in the past), but they're certainly not requ

That's exactly right. There are definitely nodejs docx templating packages (I've worked on codebases that used them in the past), but they're certainly not required provided your documents are reasonably simple. If anything, generating a pdf from various input files/structured text has been a much harder task. We generated docx files to allow for easy modification by non-technical staff, but to generate a pdf we had to use a headless instance of libreoffice since pandoc was struggling with the rendering.