[chrismmay]

Nice article. It does a great job of explaining just how much unproductive work Google has created for developers. They created SPAs with Angular in 2010, but 10 years later, their search engine still can't properly index client-side-rendered SPA applications, forcing you to jump through all these hoops, to undo the benefits of client-side rendering, just to fix what they should be fixing with their search engine. It's truly insane. What a waste of time and energy. I hope they are working on a solution. I guess this represents an opportunity for a competitor to come in and do it better.

Following your journey through troubleshooting load balancing and caching brought back memories for me. I don't know what you're using for caching, but JSR-107 has been around for nearly 20 years. You might want to check out https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-jcs/. I know it's not Javascript, but it will solve your caching problem in an orderly way. You shouldn't have to start from scratch on caching. You might even consider telling your content creators something like "updates to the site will only take effect the next day" so you can just invalidate the entire cache once a day and be done with it. Keep it simple.