You refreshed the post and never told Google

You refreshed the post and never told Google
Updated 15 decaying posts for a client — real rewrites, new sections, the works. Six weeks later, no change. Pulled it up in Search Console: Google hadn't re-crawled most of them. The work was invisible.

Now refresh isn't done until I force a re-look:
— Drop the URL in the URL Inspection tool, hit 'Request indexing'
— Add a fresh internal link from a high-traffic page (signals importance)
— Update the sitemap lastmod so it actually changes

A refresh Google hasn't seen didn't happen. Poke it after every update.