I hadn't even considered the layer of caching buildings and tracking them together, just the fundamentals of having temperature propagate from sources without being a huge resource hog. Stuff like what you've suggest would help but we'd need a bunch of different solutions I think to make it performative.
Also as always with open source there needs to be a will to do it.
Mods become out of date very quickly which means the hard part of most old mods is manually editing them to work, not installing.