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Yes, that is correct. But this isn't a characteristic of Poudriere, but of FreeBSD ports in general. If you try to build a port and it has dependencies, it will build them as well. Doing pkg search -f yourpackage will fetch the build options that were used when building the remote package if I remember correctly. So one could theoretically ascertain what are the local Poudriere and the remote repo build options.

And yes, I agree, it would be more efficient to just download the packages if the default options are unchanged. But in practice I hardly notice, because for most packages the dependencies are not too deep.

Besides, doing all the dependencies yourself adds a level of consistency. If your package depends on libwhatever.so.6 and there is a major/minor version change in that library, that might introduce a subtle but important API change, I guess you would rather prefer building libwhatever yourself to make sure that everything will work out ok.