Airtable is awesome and has lots of cool features. But Airtable has a hard rate limit of 5 requests per second across all tables. So part of the challenge is to design the integration in a way that doesn't limit scale, and that respects Airtable's rate limit.
By putting Zapier in the middle, the meter is running for every API call, but unless you are publishing a ton of content, you probably wouldn't even go past the free plan limits.
Once the data is in firebase you can just fan it out however you wish using cloud functions.
The solution isn't free, but it is free-ish. The development cost was about a day. Maybe a day and a half.