Removing this block still allows all thorax UTs to pass but I worried about impact on phoenix and asda. Idea was that after the view was initialized but before it was rendered you might work with the template.

    var view = new View({
      name: 'my-name',
      someMethod: function() {
        // do something special with template
        var output = this.template({});
      }
    });
    view.someMethod(); //raises
    view.render();
    view.someMethod(); //won't raise    

Grepped in asda and phoenix, didn't find any usage of that pattern but wanted to be on the safe side.