> the CIA report predates the attack, which is especially strange
It's only strange if you believe the CIA released notes from their super-secret psychic program rather than the more plausible explanation that this is disinformation that was backdated for a boost of prestige.
The "edge" didn't really exist at the time, along with concepts like cloud, serverless. I seem to remember that even CDN was an evolving architecture idea at the time.
AWS et al had not yet turned web servers into a commodity, so it wasn't feasible to "just deploy the software to multiple regions" to improve latency.