No. You definitely do not NEED hiking poles. The trail is almost entirely flat and mostly on hard, smooth surfaces where poles aren’t as useful. Now, if you simply prefer to poles for support, balance, rhythm or maybe just basic nostalgia (they’d be sad to miss out, perhaps), that’s perfectly fine. My knee sometimes gets sore on prolonged descents so I had considered buying some poles on arrival (we were flying carryon and the price of checking a bag is more than new poles at Decathlon) but decided to go without and am glad I didn’t bother. Overall, we saw a lot more hiking poles strapped to backpacks than we did being used.