Hello Peter,
Thank you for reaching out and I am happy to assist you with this.
What you are seeing in the dev tolls may be related to Browser Caching. the pages and the assets are also cached in the browser.
The issue you shared is very interesting and I must say, I’ve never had this kind of issue reported. I don’t want to immediately exclude the W3 Total Cache as a potential problem for this, however, can you temporarily disable our plugin and see if the problem persists.
Creating new content should assign the new post ID, and there is no reason that I can think of that would cause the issue you are referring to.
Are you positive that the old content was not edited?
Please let me know if the issue is gone when the W3 Total Cache is disabled.
Thanks!