It's actually insane that they got almost 400 million requests per second and still managed to stay online. I have to remind myself sometimes of how big Google really is.
Every few days, there's a new victim. Literally yesterday, a major ddos campaign hit Spain sites.
At some point, the whole Internet will move to the cloudflares, Google clouds, azures since they're the last bits of stability, and directly self hosting would be near impossible without constant attacks.
This is really unfortunate as these huge companies will have control over most of the internet and when they go down (which does happen) most of the Internet will go down too.
DDOS is more different than that. Imagine DDOS protection as a gatekeeper, server as an autopark while requests as a car going into it per seconds
A gate keeper typically accepts traffic in a regular rate. However, hackers who have managed to steal millions of cars at a time, decide to make them all push forward to the autopark for the purpose of distrupting it.
If the gatekeeper doesn't control the incoming traffic, it will all rush onto the autopark which will cause the autopark to be crammed as fuck. Unlike cheat software which could be visualised as something built inside one of these cars and searching them without violating privacy is kinda tough, you can do whatever upgrades needed to your gatekeeper to block the millions of rushing cars.