The only sense in which content is located anywhere is as data on a memory device somewhere. With the traditional URI in which the host part of the authority is an address of or a domain name pointing towards an actual host, you have a better indication of where the content is located than you do if this is misrepresented as being some other domain name which in fact does not at all refer to the location of the content.

The shift, if any, is that people may be less interested in where the content is located and more interested in its publishing origin.

> An example of where this occurs today is caching. You could be hitting a cache anywhere along the way. Hell you could be seeing an "offline" version, but the website would still show you the "address" of the content.

Yes, because that's how domain names work.

> This is no different, you're hitting a different cache, but the "URL" you see is the canonical address of the content you are looking at, not where it was actually fetched from.

It's different in the sense that a host name as displayed by the browser then has multiple, conflicting meanings that have no standardized precedent.