there has been a significant upgrade to the vfs cache with v1.53.0.
with older versions of rclone 1.52.x and earlier, --vfs-cache-mode full meant that rclone would have to download the entire file to the local cache, and then rclone would make that the file available for use.
with 1.53.0, --vfs-cache-mode full, rclone will only download partial chunks as needed, thus to minimize the waiting time and disk space.