This is what I’m not sure about. The behaviour of the Templates in the Backoffice is kind of broken without these files, and it really doesn’t matter if you do include them on prod. The question is if you care about that feature looking wrong.
Kevin’s posted some screenshots of what happens on this related post.
From what I’ve seen, yes. It’s not a massive problem - but if you’re trying to run Umbraco in certain high-performance scenarios it can become noticeable.