I have had my front end dev team review the need to 'cache' the adobe file and upon their initial review they are scratching their heads as to why this random number is being set. So it's not something they are doing on purpose.
we're loading the DTM file into a single page app (from our server) and we're not able to 'embed' them because that would require us to embed both Sit and Prod versions of the DTM JS file into the HTML given our deployment processes. Would this be a potential root cause of what we're seeing?
We are also hosting our site on Amazon Web Services. You mentioned that Akamai has it's own version of cache control. Are you aware of any such cache control solution with AWS (just curious, it's okay if you don't as you're not amazon)?
we are taking another look at this internally with the front end dev team next week but thought I'd reach out to explore potential causes and solutions.