No, only views which hit a stale copy of the rendered page and have to call that render() function. Normal views would (I imagine, I haven't traced it back) use

No, only views which hit a stale copy of the rendered page and have to call that render() function. Normal views would (I imagine, I haven't traced it back) use the get_rendered() instead, which checks that the cached version is current and schedules a re-rendering (which obviously requires DB writes anyway) if necessary.