Why does CloudFlare have these problems and other CDNs like CloudFront and Akamai don’t?
CloudFlare is free/cheap, has (AFAIK) no KYC policy, and is generally unresponsive to abuse reports unless the courts get involved, so it's the default choice for nearly all piracy sites, phishing sites, DDoS providers, etc. The few which do get kicked out of CF generally have to resort to dubious Russian CDNs because none of the other mainstream CDNs will have them.
> dubious Russian CDNs
Are there multiple? I thought DDoS-Guard [1] had a near-monopoly on CDN services for international piracy.
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/01/hamas-may-be-threat-to-8...
No, CloudFlare is implicated as well. If you watch videos from any of the major pirate TVoD sites and inspect the traffic, you can see they're frequently using CloudFlare as their global CDN with a Chinese origin site.
Entire Amazon AS-numbers are sometimes blocked so CloudFront consumers have the same issue. The thing with CF is the scale. They are really big and that is why it gets noticed. When it comes to Akamai they don't have shady customers in general and the risk of a problem is less. They also have a better infrastructure.