I am a plebe who doesn’t understand these things but what exactly does cloudflare do? I see it popping up more and more often redirecting before visiting a site. I assume that this has something to do with bot traffic? It seems like every mention of cloudflare is about how it ruined someone’s day.
Cloudflair provides a lot of network services that are during levels of difficult to achieve.
They provide really great services at a free level but doing so there make you the product.
They can be used to let you host a reasonably secure website at your house behind your ISP firewall that won’t let you host, with SSL that you don’t have to maintain. They handled dynamic DNS and host names and honestly dozens of other things that are all useful.
Essentially morally they’re like Google back in the early 2000s. Eventually they’ll need more money and force us to pay or get out.
FYI, making you the product is only a tiny part of their stated reasoning:
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/88659/how-can-cloudflare-offer-a-free-cdn-with-unlimited-bandwidth