is byte-compilation still required with native-comp?

I'm just going through my init and trying to speed things up a bit, and wondering: is byte-compilation still required when running native-comp? If not, can I do something in use-package to turn it off?

For a file to be natively compiled, it has to have been byte compiled. See "16.1 How Programs Do Loading" in the Elisp manual.

thank you!