Ok, thanks for confirming, I'm closing the ticket then.
>Was that a workaround for something or is that something that I need to do whenever I update an attribute mapping?
Simply changing the mapping itself won't trigger the update to already existing entries until next time they'll be changed in the backend, that's how CR works at the moment. By clearing this cache directory you may it look it like (to CR) that all entries in backend have changed at once, so it will update all of them, according to new mappings.