Preloading the user-content array presents memory usage problems if there is a metric crap-ton of content on the site. We don't want to cause users to have Fatal Errors, so it'll probably make more sense to to refactor this portion to use the WP REST API.
If the REST API isn't feasible, then we could still refactor it to use AJAX for user-searches rather than the REST API until the API has the functionality we need.
Preloading the user-content array presents memory usage problems if there is a metric crap-ton of content on the site. We don't want to cause users to have Fatal Errors, so it'll probably make more sense to to refactor this portion to use the WP REST API.