[solardev]

Well, there's invalidations etc., to consider. Wordpress uses its plugin system to interact with the various caches: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/optimization-cac...

But basically, it's an essential part of a modern Wordpress stack (lol, what an oxymoron, I know), not an afterthought. It's not something a lone-wolf admin using a generic Varnish/Nginx config should do, but part of a large a community-driven effort to improve Wordpress performance. These plugins are very well integrated into the Wordpress base system and cache many parts of it.

This isn't so much to defend Wordpress (whose ancient architecture requires the use of these techniques), but to express surprise that a modern software like Mastodon doesn't have this built-in.