>However, due to the caching refresh cycle, CMS updates were taking many seconds to show up on the website. The issue made it problematic for content editors to preview their modifications and got progressively worse as the amount of content grew, resulting in delays lasting tens of seconds.
This seems superficial, why not have a local-only CMS site to preview changes for the fast feedback loop and then you only have to dump the text to prod?
>got progressively worse as the amount of content grew, resulting in delays lasting tens of seconds.
This is like the only legit concern to justify redoing this, but even then, it was still only taking seconds to a minute.