how does additional css rendering work?

Additional CSS in the customiser is core WordPress functionality and shouldn’t behave differently between themes. You can see in /wp-includes/js/customize-preview.js that the preview is simply JavaScript that simply sets the content of the <style id="wp-custom-css"></style> element to the content of the Custom CSS text field. The <style> element itself is added by the wp_custom_css_cb() function hooked into wp_head at priority 101. So as long as you have the wp_head() function in your theme, it should behave exactly the same way.