Your request is nonsensical because Discourse is a JavaScript app that does not retrieve HTML…
I totally respect your experience and expertise here, but I’ve run dozens of javascript-rendered web applications that use ETags in the root response (if the content can be reused).
all “pages” are built via executable JavaScript code in real time.
The screenshot I posted above is the HTML that is returned before any clientside code runs, so there is certainly something on the backend (I’m assuming rails) serving this route.
Every single discourse community I’ve looked at (besides this one), initially returns a a javascript-less version of the site with all of the content rendered, presumably for crawlers.
Apologies if I’m way off here, but I don’t think I am being “non-sensical,” I may just be wrong.