There exists competition, they've just been doing it consistently well at a large scale for awhile.
They've done nothing to prevent competition, because they're legit AF. The competition just hasn't put a dent in their market share because they're excellent at what they do.
Agreed, and I would say what cloudflare does for the internet (their work on the IETF, generally letting small sites stay alive without needing an SRE to worry about DDoS attacks, etc) outweighs the general negative possibility of them being a potential single point of failure
Well the admin of a site could opt out of using cloudflare for the time being, a user could do literally nothing. Errors in Cloudflare can easily take down their servers and therefore the CDN and access to like 20% of websites. And Bugs in Cloudflare can even leak user data.
So cloudflare can grant DDOS Protection, CDNs and other exploiting protection, but can take down large parts of everything, temporarily or permanently.
Shhhh you can't just be reasonable here. This guy watched a YouTube video, he knows what he's talking about
If cloudflare decided not to host my server I would have a bit of downtime, a couple of hours, but I'd be up again on someone else's CDN tomorrow. I don't think OP understands the role of cloudflare at all.
There are benefits and costs. Cloudflare makes it easy to maintain high uptime as a small site sysadmin at the cost of free DDoS protection isn't actually free. Cloudflare turns all users of websites that employ it into the products of surveillance capitalism