Hey @R101, @slackmoehrle thanks for your suggestions.
The issue was on my side - as I mentioned I have a custom object (inherits from Node). I moved some code around and I was adding children to the object before setting its content size. this caused the children to appear but off-screen. You could easily think they are not there.
What threw me off is the fact that SpriteFrameCache doesn’t store the texture name - it got me thinking that might be the issue here.