I can't give you exact answer, but I can at least weigh in with my own experiences. I might be completely wrong, but anyway...

To cut an answer short, it may well do, yes. I have - when using very low protein flour* - noticed that a cake has a tendency to over rise and dome in the middle, often cracking slightly. Combine the low protein flour with a very light hand when mixing the ingredients together, one could well assume that there is almost no gluten formation at all.

I also work in a small bakery, and was once trialling different scone recipes using various liquid fats to see how it affected the texture. Well, not wanting 30 different scones on my hands, I halved the recipe. This made it a lot easier to gather the ingredients into a very soft dough, with almost no elasticity whatsoever. The standard recipe used bread flour, and 1/20th of the weight of flour in baking powder (500g flour, 5 tsp/25g baking powder, so I used 250g flour and 2.5 tsp baking powder).

They went in the oven, and something very odd happened. On opening the door to give the tray a turn around, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. When, however, I went to take them out of the oven, they had collapsed entirely. The edges had deflated slightly, and the tops had domed and cracked JUST like the cakes above. Intrigued, I repeated the experiment, and got the same result. Wish I'd taken photos.

I might be entirely wrong, but SOME gluten seems to be necessary to actually give the sponge/dough some structure. I have never had a problem when folding in flour using a hand mixer on low speed, or by hand. It only seems to be present when using a very low protein flour >8%) and using an extremely light hand when mixing ingredients.

I hope this helps, or at least gives you some ideas.