Remember when you could just go to a website without being humiliated by cloudflare when you least expect?

They keep saying it all as if centralizing the internet around a single point of failure and letting it also see unencrypted data of millions of websites is a good thing. Maybe I'm too old, but I'm just not having it. That's not at all how the internet is supposed to work.

The comment you replied to was on the right track, but you are barking up the wrong tree. Cloudflare is successful because the internet has fundamental issues that aren't going to get solved in the near future, like trivial abuse and a world where botnets are easier, cheaper, and stronger than ever. It's website and server operators who opt-in to Cloudflare.

It's more helpful to ask yourself why people use it instead of just harping on the downsides.

Any open system that becomes sufficiently popular will be attacked by spammers, malware/ransomware, black hat hackers, and DOS attacks, no exceptions.

Anyone planning to implement any kind of open or federated system today needs to take note of this and bake in mitigations against it from the very first line of code.