I can't point to code, but from experience, changes usually register quickly.

Changes being adding a new file, changes to an existing one and so on.

.

While I hadn't thought of it, I haven't noticed issues around it. Using a platform like Drupal, Wordpress, Django, etc most paths don't exist on disk and just fall to the index file or get proxied to another server.

So this might be an issue for static files uploaded or static sites. Talking about Drupal and Wordpress, that would usually be,

    sites/default/files/
    wp-content