No, you don't, that's required only if you want to run a non-pruned full node. You can just sync and verify everything without storing all the blocks and therefore, you can run a full node with only few gigabytes of space, which is pruning, that's told to you a page now.

You can't lookup on transactions of other people, but you can look up your transactions, which is the only thing that matters if you make personal use.