You have "awakened a zombie". It's been about 3 years since anyone posted to this
thread. In this industry at this time, it's even odds that all the original participants have moved on to other jobs and other projects. Even me, although I've kept the JavaRanch position for quite a while.
Component IDs do not need to be unique within the View Definition, just within a given naming container. Those containers must have unique ID within their parent naming containers (if any) and so on all the way up. The net result is that the
generated HTML ID is unique, even though the JSF View Template Language ID is not.
However, the complaint here had to do with discrepancies that come from when the View Template does not contain an explicit ID and system-generated IDs (j_xxxxx) are created. JSF can get out of sync on those when a page is refreshed, which is why the first recommendation is to give stuff explicit IDs.