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But what I'm saying is, doesn't caching accomplish essentially the same thing? You process the resource once, cache the result and serve that. Full static site generation just seems like a more aggressive version of the same thing, and AFAIK you have to give up some of the benefits of being partially dynamic (like the ability to do have a "Latest comments" sidebar without unnecessarily relying on JavaScript).

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I think there's a semantic hangup here, what you're describing is accurate, but it probably "better" explained (in the case of something like the popular wordpress caching plugins) as "compiling" your content to flat HTML which is saved on disk. The web server/CDN can then "cache" that file.

Yes, end results are equivalent, but complexity shifts.

If a consistent stack is more important, caching may be the best option. If fewer layers of complexity at run-time is more important, out-of-band/pre-processing may be the best option.

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