There's no such "filesystem caching" phenomenon on macOS Mojave and earlier, so that theory falls apart rather quickly. There's also the consistent difference b

There's no such "filesystem caching" phenomenon on macOS Mojave and earlier, so that theory falls apart rather quickly. There's also the consistent difference between timing results with internet connection enabled vs disabled. I'm not sure why you couldn't reproduce the delay. There are several possibilities I can imagine, but these could only be proved or disproved by more testing. In any case, many people have reproduced the delay, on close to "factory default" Mac installs.