Is there a way of having content + sidebar without full featured panel?

Yes you can have content + sidebar without featured panel.

Whereas the CTA arrow part of the featured panel used to be fixed exclusivley to the featured panel, it is now possible to insert a sidepanel arrow and create your own text (using posts/page editor) and paste that into the widget and it will show up in any sidebar you assign to any page. (you can set that up using the WP page editor to get it looking how you want it and then copy and paste the html from the "html view" option in the editor.