I am somehow out of the loop about why Cloudflare is as big as it is? There are many other CDNs, why them?
Free tier that let you hide your server IPs, cheap domain registry (with no margin) and even some also tunnels for zero trust. Like I used them for a lot of personal and tbh even commercial projects for years paying them $0. Also they have bandidth alliance with Backblaze so you can serve 100s of TBs for free.
So there a lot of convinience and free stuff. It's quite obviously that when I had commercial customers where for whatever reason free tier wasn't anough I juse used them as well. Why not? There are horror stories about their corporate pricing, but for smaller company paying $20-200 for CDN is no brainer.
Also huge massive advantage of CloudFlare is that majority of their services are not metered so it's hard to wake up to $100,000 bill like it can happen with AWS and almost any other CDN provider.
I still believe this kind of centralized MiTM is bad for us all, but honestly I'd rather it be CloudFlare than Amazon, Microsoft or some other "evil corp".
Thanks for the thorough write-up. I am also conflicted that somebody has so much power in the market but at least they are not AWS/GCP.
Cloudflare is very easy for small sites to use. The enterprise market is where the competition is.
Descent free tier, not restricted to enterprise customers, many features, good overall quality.