Which would have terrible performance for range requests starting late in a large file. For files that are frequently accessed that way, this could be prohibitive.

You could split the file into independently compressed blocks as well. But that'd reduce compression rate and require adding some kind of index for seeking.

Or they have an upper size limit for the file size they compress, since large files are rarely compressible text.

In any case it is something that needs the be handled before going live with a compressed cache. But the article sounds like they simply didn't implement compressed caching for those cases, which makes no sense.