I completely agree with your observations and sentiments. It's frustrating to see default configurations that don't take advantage of the latest technologies, especially given the potential impact on web performance and user experience.

In general, it really is supposed to be about keeping things simple; many organizations go overboard trying to quickly deploy new tech, without fully appreciating either the trade-offs or optimal usage patterns.

Your insights into POPs are spot-on, there occurs a tendency by entities overly-focused on marketing, to help showcase "presence" in as more locations or places as possible rather than laying a strong groundwork through well considered technical planning & maintainence which often comes with some focus on consolidation across reception locations & diligent tuning of peaks / seasons for business spiked activity modes among various client types (incldg gaming / ecommerce/ video streams variety).

I think here too there could be possibilities for tie-ins between both cutting-edge CDN-side delivery location information searching along with Latency-optimized architecture framework than just relying extensively geographically diversified investments .

Ideally though I feel generating awareness among developers regarding leverage optimization efforts over simplified-caching page-by-page deployment paradigms would bring a series of pretty big effects. We should aim our weapons not just towards success but ultimately: simplicity.