Literate programming and cloud-operated open literate educational resources (COOLERs) have been catching the attention of the education community in recent years. This set of learning materials mainly comprises digital notebook-like documents, which are stored, backed, and delivered from cloud services and eventually displayed in students' web browsers. As we demonstrate in this article, the advent of cloud architectures and the COVID-19 pandemic (which forced worldwide long-term distant academic environments) fortuitously teamed up with this learning and methodological trend by easing its use and fostering its adoption. With more detail, we have quantitatively measured the impact that the COOLER paradigm has had on the teaching realm by analyzing five years of logged data gathered by its current major player in the ecosystem: MyBinder. Among other results, we show how this growth in the production and delivery of notebooks made an important leap during the second SARS-CoV-2 wave (July-September 2020). However, the general usage trend seems to have strongly decreased after the end of the most recent seventh wave (September 2022), coinciding with the official end of the global health crisis and all the lockdown episodes. From these examined data, we conclude that COOLER and recent massive online learning scenarios have been very intimately linked. This fact may represent a flaw in the adoption of these exciting and useful learning materials.