Yep, that appears correct.
I am little confused about your questions. The thread title is about which layout is called, and that is in the lookup order docs. And to render the pages, it needs the front matter blocks. Is there anything else we missed?
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I was poking around, wondering if you just have a preference to not use front matter, when I looked at your raw about.md file. I think I know what is happening here!
The default behavior of Hugo is to render Markdown files using Go templates, in the theme and in the layouts directory. Your pages are marked up as HTML, with inline divs and all that. Most Markdown parsers handle that, but it isn’t what Hugo is made for. At that point, you are doing all the work of the templates in each piece of content, whereas Hugo assists in writing Markdown and creating the HTML when the site builds.
Anyhow, I suggest you move the layout HTML into the templates, and rewrite the content pages as Markdown, with front matter. For instance, you can use title in the front matter to pass the title of the page in the template, rather than hard-coding an h1 in each piece of content.
It may seem like a lot of work for a small site with four pages, but one of the features of Hugo is that it can scale for very large sites, and if you are going to hand code each page, you may be better off not using a site generator.
Also, most themes presume front matter, such as how Minimo chooses to show the title. With empty front matter, Hugo isn’t doing you any favors.
Good luck with that, that website seems like a valuable effort. 