I just learned that NFS does not use a file system cache on the client side.
That's ... incorrect. NFS is cache-capable. NFSv3 (I think? It may have been v2) started sending metadata on file operations that was intended to allow for client-side caches. NFSv4 added all sorts of stateful behavior which allows for much more aggressive caching.
Where did you read that you could not use caching with NFS?
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