Maybe their point is just privatisation or something.
For example a dns provider like cloudfare just could artificially make latency costs for servers that don't agree with something cloudfare does bigger, which would result in them being less likely to be displayed in a search result because a search engine would have IP adresses faster from other servers. This obviously depends on if a search engine makes dns requests or just provides hostnames for the end user.
But everybody is also moving into their castle. Many for free.
They are not allowed to let people do that unless they have an argument that, somehow, this makes money for the owners of Cloudflare. Maybe that's in the form of good publicity. Maybe they're hoping to set up some tollbooths at the castle gate, once enough people are inside and the other options have withered for lack of customers.
My negative experiences as an end user take priority over any positive experience told to me by a third party in a usage case that doesn't apply to me.
Your experience as an end user is only available because cloudflare exists. That's why your end user opinion doesn't matter, because bad actors are constantly trying to ruin the internet and cloudflare is the gatekeeper. As a server owner I need security at the door to keep our illegal activity. Your opinion of "I don't like security at the door" is dually noted and immediately thrown away.
Using cloudflare is more reliable than using your own stuff which is still an option that nobody chooses anymore because it's better to choose cloudflare or something similar.
I'm going to go ahead and assume you don't work with internet security in any way, have no experience in web development, and have never attempted to provide web application services to more people than you can count on your fingers, but if you had, cloudflare is mana from heaven.
Honestly, I don't know how any end user who doesn't understand IT and wasn't around before services like Cloudflare were available can say this. They objectively don't have the information or experience to make the claim.
Yes, the internet is much bigger than it was in 2003, and it needs more complex protective tools. The fact that you haven't noticed cloudflare when it is working is a sign that it is, well, working.
And the fact that your favorite sites aren't down more often is yet another sign. Downtime due to DDOS attacks alone would be so much greater without cloudflare than downtime due to cloudflare currently is. Your perspective is a pure lack of knowledge and an excess of confirmation bias.
Have you ever self hosted a website? Was that a modern website, or just a bunch of text? Are you experienced with uptime SLAs on multiple services? Have you ever had to deal with a DDOS attack?
There are lots of things that Cloudflare does that requires experience and knowledge to notice or understand. And it isn't even the biggest single point of failure when it comes to the Internet. When AWS has an outage for instance there is a huge chunk of the Internet that goes down.
There are problems with the centralization of the Internet. But this happened for a reason, and it has been so long and these services have been so reliable that people don't even realize what it was like before.
Don't use memes to make decisions I'm just mad I can't use the discord app on my desktop, can't download manga from nhentai without jumping through hoops anymore, and have to solve 5 captchas in a row when I use a vpn which is all the time.
I really think that on the list of worst single points of failure, DNS is not one of them. Given how easy it is to actually switch. And given that cloudflare outages are not nearly as common, The times they do happen usually are only for half an hour or so.
I am baffled seeing so much cloudflare fanboys here...
Cloudflare is everywhere, it sees everything, it holds everything, it has private keys for tons and tons of websites, it's subject to the absence of any privacy law in the US, but they are "nice". Wow.
Google also was nice. It used to give you good results. Twitter also was nice.
Considering how I (try) to do bug bounties for money, it's bad for that, but otherwise, it'd probably be worse without it, considering how it seems a lot of developers seem to totally rely on it for reflected XSS protection.