You don’t even need all the ceremony. If the config gets updated every 5 minutes, it surely is being hot-reloaded. If that’s the case, the old config is already in memory when the new config is being parsed. If that’s the case, parsing shouldn’t have panicked, but logged a warning, and carried on with the old config that must already be in memory.
> If that’s the case, the old config is already in memory when the new config is being parsed
I think that's explicitly a non-goal. My understanding is that Cloudflare prefers fail safe (blocking legitimate traffic) over fail open (allowing harmful traffic).