I'm also a Claude Code user from day 1 here, back from when it wasn't included in the Pro/Max subscriptions yet, and I was absolutely not aware of this either. Your explanation makes sense, but I naively was also under the impression that re-using older existing conversations that I had open would just continue the conversation as is and not be a treated as a full cache miss.

My biggest learning here is the 1 hour cache window. I often have multiple Claudes open and it happens frequently that they're idle for 1+ hours.

This cache information should probably get displayed somewhere within Claude Code